If Kennedy had lived...Bernau does a great job in continuing the story with romance, intrigue, and a great ending.

It is another work in a long series of fictional war novels which offers an alternative ending to the lives of the bunker dwelling leaders of the Third Reich at the end of WWII. The elements involved in plot for Joseph Goebbels' (and as we find out later Hitler's) escape from the surrounded city of Berlin are quite unoriginal. Things like doubles, secret passages, fake suicides tablets and etc has been pretty much done to death by others. The superweapon Phoenix is highly unprobable for the science of biological weapons possessed by any side in 1945 and the workings of it are never quite explained. Even today with all the advancments in field of bioweapons of massive capabilities, the Pheonix microbe is still in realm of fiction!!
The plot of the escape of villans is highly unlikely and complicated. The worst part comes of course when we find out that Goebbols' escape was cover for Hitler's and that is when the storyline unravels all over the place. The personal emotions and actions expressed by charcters involved in the escape plot comes in contradiction with the all telling explanation in the end. The tell all chapter bears striking resemblance to a combination a Scooby-doo/James Bond confronting the villan scene.
Anyway, for those interested in fictional work on this subject (alternative endings of the chancellory bunker crew) i would suggest "The Berkut" or "The Knight's Cross".

This book has the makings of a brilliant WWII techno-thriller with personable characters and a fairly well thought out plot. Sadly the story loses momentum and the characters take on a very stylized formula which muddles the plot and becomes preditcable. It doesn't seem like the author did much research before undertaking this work, either on biological warfare or Nazi Germany. It is interesting reading, but had much more potential.