Particularly Dangerous Work: Part 3, Reflection on the Water

This volume completes the story of the Vizconde Rodrigo Manuel de Mendoza y de la Cerda, a diplomat with the Spanish Foreign Service and an Olympic champion. Part 1 of this series was published in 2017. In that initial part of this trilogy readers met Rodrigo Mendoza in 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, and began the long journey of following him through the months leading up to the outbreak of the war, the early part of the war, and the uncertainties the world faced at the beginning of 1941. The second part continued his story through the difficult years the British and their allies faced through the middle of 1941, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and the entry of the United States into the war. This third and final part starts in early 1943. It follows the decline and demise of the Nazi regime in Germany and the end of the war.

Rodrigo’s journey from 1943 through 1945 takes him from a Berlin crumbling under the weight of a collapsing Nazi regime and the barrage of Allied bombing to a journey through Nazi occupied territory. As an Allied spy, Rodrigo is hunted by the Gestapo, and his fate is constantly in peril. Rodrigo’s journey, as in the first two volumes, is packed with action, adventure, romance, and intrigue. His story is artfully woven into the historical realities of the World War II era. Readers will find themselves on edge following the march of the Red Army through Eastern Europe, the British and American pursuit of the Desert Fox across North Africa, and the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Readers will be elated at the liberation of Paris and its sudden rebirth as the cultural capital of the world and will grieve the loss of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the eve of victory in Europe.