‘The Dark Frontier’ by A.B. Decker is an intriguing and detailed tale with historical and thrilling twists. Recently married reporter Frank Goss jumps at the opportunity to travel to Switzerland to cover the 1971 vote on Women’s suffrage. Once there things start to get interesting, as his wife Ellen receives a phone call to say he’s had an accident. We are then sent back to 1937, where Frank Eigenmann has managed to catch himself in a web of espionage and intrigue in a Swiss border town, shadowed by the Third Reich.
This is an interesting plot, with detailed characters, changing timelines, secrets and mysteries that unfold slowly. Ellen’s story, the cat and mouse hints and sightings about the whereabouts of her husband and her developing connections with Dr Zellwegger and his wife, Marthe is as interesting as Frank’s murkier tale of subterfuge.
This is an interesting and slow burning thriller, this book compels you to keep reading to work out the mystery at the heart of this plot. Playing with the idea of past lives and their effects, this plotline held echoes of ‘Cloud Atlas’ for me. ‘The Dark Frontier’ is a complex and absorbing read, I was left guessing about how it was going to end until the final pages.
The death of journalist Frank Goss has cast a shadow full of troubling question marks over Ellen's bereavement. Above all, what led him to disappear from her life without any explanation?
When Frank arrives in Basel, Switzerland, to cover a referendum on women's suffrage in 1971, he is plagued by hallucinations. After admission to a clinic, he vanishes. And Ellen is left only with a mysterious verse that psychiatrist Dr Zellweger says he wrote before discharging himself. But not only do the descriptions of their patient not tally with the Frank she knows. The patient gave his name as Eigenmann. Had he been living a separate life she knew nothing about?
While she searches for Frank with generous support from Zellweger's wife Marthe, the story of Eigenmann gradually emerges: the drama of a man possessed, exiled in a border town beset by the bullying behaviour of its Nazi neighbours in the late 1930s and drawn by the allure of a beautiful woman. But was this all a figment of Frank's imagination? Only after his funeral is it brought home to Ellen that she was offered a clue to unlocking this mystery from the outset.
