Jenkins, Geoffrey A Twist of Sand

A mishmash of an adventure novel, set along the Skeleton Coast of Southwest Africa, initially during World War 2 circa 1941/1942 and then later in the mid-1950s. The World War 2 portion of the novel has Jenkins’ hero, a Royal Navy submarine commander, pursuing and eventually destroying what turns out to be the prototype for a German nuclear submarine. (The German U-boat had been preying on ships in the South Atlantic and Jenkins makes the Nazi vessel responsible for the real-life 1942 Skeleton Coast grounding of the Blue Star Line refrigerated cargo liner DUNEDIN STAR). Fast forward to the 1950s: Jenkins’ English commander, cashiered by the Royal Navy yet restrained by an oath of silence from revealing anything concerning the German nuclear submarine, is now a successful fisherman on the Skeleton Coast. There he’s forced (blackmailed really) into taking a German naturalist up the Coast to a forbidden landing hundreds of miles from civilization. Along the way he has an improbable romance with a Swiss female naturalist. By tale’s end petroleum reserves have been discovered, and many of Jenkins’ cardboard characters have been killed off.