Dead Zone

Dead Zone is an inventive and exciting thriller set during the Second World War. It takes as its starting point, a detail from Antony Beevor's Berlin, in which he describes how a strangely mixed band of deserters surrendered in Poland to the advancing Soviet forces. The novel develops this in an imaginative and suspenseful fashion, following the story of the band through to their betrayal to and capture by the Soviet secret police. The police chief reveals the hitherto concealed backgrounds of each individual before they are taken off to HQ for punishment. The last chapter provides a major metaphysical twist that requires the reader to reconsider everything s/he has read before, and in the process to grapple with the underlying themes. At this deeper level, the novel problematizes attitudes towards crime and punishment, sin and atonement, and debates these themes in the light of Dostoevsky's two most famous novels, both of which are intertextualised in Dead Zone. The result is emphatically not feel-good; but it is exciting and thought-provoking.