I've enjoyed Joseph O'Connors work whenever I've read it over the years, starting all the way back with 'Cowboy and Indians’ and 'Desparadoes' back in the early nineties. He was on to the Monsignor and had compiled a dossier on him but so far had not been able to charge him with anything. Many of these obscene war criminals were – filing down the teeth of prisoners to pulp being interrogated during the day and tucking their kids in bed at night.

Other details pertaining to the mission and the participants can be gathered from written statements, pages from an unpublished memoir and interview transcripts of the choir members twenty years after the events (1962-63)which are interspersed throughout the narrative. Included with those fleeing were many Jews who hid among the thousands hoping to find a way to safety. There are a number of heroic locals committed to making the Nazi’s malignant presence as difficult as possible.Working in real time on Christmas Eve 1943 leading up to a crucial operation across Rome, the story is enhance by later interviews with some of the participants remembering their wartime exploits. The timelines building up to the escape are told through their viewpoints, some of them interviews after the event, which adds to the feel of authenticity. It was a dangerous game they played with Hauptmann, one where their own lives would have been extinguished if found they housed and kept Jews safe. The glory and the incandescence of the human spirit shines so much brighter against the darkness of the failed Fascist ideology.

There are also brilliant little details about life in neutral Vatican City such as the fact it was necessary for residents to apply for a haircut pass the leave its boundaries. But Hauptmann's net begins closing in on the Escape Line and the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical.The story has a good sense of place and emergency but is also interspersed with transcripts of interviews for the other members of O’Flaherty’s ‘Choir,’ which is the cover for his activities. You don’t understand the fact that hope, if it is ever encountered, is in the small things of the everyday, not an announcement from on high. The Author’s Note provides a list of references for those who want to read more about the true events that inspired this novel. It is estimated through the use of safe houses and churches this indomitable group saved some six thousand five hundred people under the very eyes of the Gestapo. It's thought that through O'Flaherty, with the help of his choir and surrounding network, over 6,000 people were saved.