On the face of it, Slade novels just shouldn't work as well as they do. Wild genre blending, fantastic connection of seemingly unconnected facts, and casual rule-breaking such as frequent authorial intrusions, all should combine to render the works of Michael Slade harder to read and swallow. Instead, the Slade formula is inherently readable, consistently entertaining, and often illuminating.

Slade's revolving cast of Mounties—members of Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)—who also happen to be agents of Special X, the serial crimes unit, continually find themselves facing psychopaths and sociopaths whose megalomania and murderous tendencies achieve operatic levels. Blending the old-fashioned cops who wear the Red Serge with current-day high-tech crime detection makes for an unusually interesting juxtaposition (akin to the French Foreign Legion's colorful past, perhaps the only vaguely similar comparison one can find). Bringing in the historical angle is a Slade trademark and adds depth to what might otherwise be run-of-the-mill psychosexual homicide fare.

To those in the know, Michael Slade is not a person, but rather the pseudonym of a team effort that has led to ten other successful outings of the Canadian psycho-hunters. Though always anchored by former trial lawyer Jay Clarke's wild imagination and proven storytelling abilities, the team currently includes Clarke's daughter, Rebecca. For Swastika, the Clarkes have also recruited a senior member of the Clarke family, the late Flight Lieutenant Jack Clarke, who flew against the Third Reich in WWII and whose logbooks yielded material too good for Slade to pass up. The result is a grim tale of a modern-day psycho whose connections to the last days of Hitler are slowly unfolded in parallel plots in which elements of the Third and Fourth Reichs meet Nazi and American post-war weapons technology secrets, psychopathic murders in a secret mine shaft, and a recent case in which the RCMP brought down a killer whose MO included a swine farm (and if you have to ask, you're reading the wrong kind of books).

In Swastika, some of the usual Mounties (Zinc Chandler, Special X Chief Superintendent DeClercq, and others) take a backseat to Sergeant Dane Winter (a representative of the author, his grandfather's logbooks yield similar information as Jack Clarke's). Winter catches the case of a recently released child-killer's ritualistic murder, which traces back to the Ripper, Chandler's psycho from Bed of Nails. But this is only the beginning, for that murder leads to a double series of other killings which, together, wrap up several parallel plots involving Hitler's V-2 rocket weapons, the Final Solution and slave labor, and the last days in the Berlin bunker which became Hitler's grave. Winter knows that his case may lead him into the ranks of the elite Special X unit, so he makes a tenuous bargain with Cort Jantzen, a bird-dogging crime journalist who's been personally contacted by the "Swastika killer," so-named because of the Nazi symbol carved into the victims' flesh. Toss in some Pentagon "black ops" hitmen and you've mixed a potent cocktail of perverted crimes, historical fact, government cover-ups, and speculative science wrapped in the mantle of a novel that begs to be called "horror."

This description barely scratches the surface of the connections among the many bizarre elements of the plot, a story which will keep you guessing even when you think you've solved it. This is fiction with the bite of historical fact. Cursory examination of just a few of Slade's well-documented sources shows that historically, the novel's presentation of the World War II elements—Hitler's weapons programs including the V-2, the last days in the bunker, and (are you ready?) Roswell—are right on the money. The actual 2002 prostitute killings add verisimilitude to the connecting points of this star-shaped time-bending novel that's at once a mystery, a historical adventure, a serial-killer crime novel, and a tender tribute to the author's father, whose dashing persona lends a noble atmosphere to the protagonist's quest.

The execution isn't quite flawless. Sometimes transitions are either jarring or awkward. We don't spend enough time with Dane Winter, who's interesting enough to warrant more attention, or any of the other cops. And the climax is a bit muddled, due mostly to the confluence of the various plot lines. Oh, and gunshots don't need to be rendered phonetically as Bwam! (exclamation included). But really, these are minor points in an otherwise entertaining mix of fact and fiction. It may be possibly unappetizing to some readers who think the US Government always wears white hats, and Slade does toss in a slice of Canadian complicity, but the official whitewash surrounding the "defecting" Nazi scientists and the birth of the US space program is a matter of record. Ultimately, Slade's point seems to be that good and evil will always find a way to coexist, all too often in the same willing vessel.