A sweeping story about two survivors who stop running from their pasts and finally choose each other.
Mark Russell has made himself indispensable in Washington’s intelligence circles, documenting the human wreckage of a North African prison camp in a report bound directly for the president’s desk. But his own life feels like it’s unraveling. He buried the woman he planned to marry along with the child she was carrying, and pushed away the one person who might have helped him through it. That person, Rhonda Childress, is stuck on the Soviet desk, determined to get back into the field. Rhonda is angling for a transfer back to Bern to finish the fieldwork she started with a German resistance contact she can no longer bring herself to love, work that pulls her deep into enemy territory long before Russ can catch up. Russ, meanwhile, is racing toward South America hunting looted fortunes and forged passports, aided by a colleague whose hobby of studying the region turns into a full intelligence operation. When the plot against Hitler collapses, their separate missions briefly throw them together in Germany on a desperate extraction, but the reckoning they’ve both avoided only comes later, when Rhonda goes deep undercover alone, with Russ left to wait for the war to end before he can reach her.
David Tanner shows his true love of the era in the deliberate way he builds a timeline. Every chapter opens with a real, dated event, from the beginning of a battle to a diplomatic break to a new weapon coming online. This keeps readers oriented inside a conflict that’s moving fast and falling apart in a dozen places at once, and it gives every scene a sense of borrowed time. Audiences already know exactly how close the end is, even when the characters don’t. Despite the grim backdrop, the book never sits in despair because there’s a current of hope running through it that keeps it from feeling heavy, even in its darkest moments. The women carry as much of the narrative as the men do, and Tanner gives each a distinct kind of courage: Rhonda risks her life running agents out of neutral Bern, the Swiss listening post where the OSS works the war from the inside; Alex Stennett flies transport missions as a WAFS pilot working to keep her career as the war winds down; and her copilot Josie Braxton breaks into a field that rarely lets women near a cockpit at all. Every one of them is drawn with her own history and stakes. What stays with you most, though, is the restraint in the central relationship. Russ and Rhonda spend long stretches talking past one another, apologizing for the wrong things and unable to say what they actually feel. That held-back quality makes the eventual reckoning worth the wait in a way a straightforward romance never could. More than simply a wartime drama or immersive historical suspense, Surrender on a Forgotten Isle is a sweeping story about two survivors who stop running from their pasts and finally choose each other.
