A Room Full of Night by T. R. Kenneth

Stag Maguire, a burnt-out journalist hardly able to prop himself up in the wake of tragedy, agrees to help a friend move. They find an urgent message—HELP ME—written on a piece of silk tacked behind a long-forgotten portrait. The message from an address in Berlin is urgent—though it had to have been written pre-World War II.

Curious, Stag and his friend begin to research the address and whoever might have written the message. They trace the address to an apartment, a sealed time capsule that has not been lived in since 1942. And from one phone call to that apartment, the men unleash a nefarious plot and brutal security forces long thought vanquished.

Events begin to cascade without mercy, and Stag—a broken man from the Midwest—finds himself pitted against a vestige of the Third Reich with powerful forces ensuring the propagation of Heydrich’s infamous SD—Nazi’s intelligence agency—in today’s world.

Will ordinary-man Stag Maguire prevail in his lone stand against evil?

Author T R Kenneth discussed her thriller, A ROOM FULL OF NIGHT, with The Big Thrill, and here’s what she had to say:

Without spoilers, are there any genre conventions you wanted to upend or challenge with this book?

I think we now tend to use the mental illness of the protagonist as a device for suspense. That’s hard to do, but while my hero is obviously broken and traumatized, there is something in him that won’t let any of it get in the way. I think now people tend to discount plain old-fashioned intelligence. And malice. 🙂

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

I hope they find it enjoyable—we all need distractions! I also hope they think how easy it is to slide into genocide.

What attracts you to this book’s genre?

I’ve always been fascinated by the struggle between darkness and light, and how blurry the line between good and evil can be.

What was the biggest challenge this book presented? What about the biggest opportunity?

The biggest challenge was evoking the period correctly, and most importantly, Heydrich. It was also the biggest opportunity as all my decades of knowledge were able to be used.

What’s the one question you wish someone would ask you about this book, or your work in general? 

There’s an old German proverb, “Beware the beginnings,” that I use in my next book. My question would be, “What are the signs of the beginning of genocide?” My answer would be to look around you and THINK. Don’t be swayed by your tribe, your politics, or your initial feelings. Get the facts and know the signs.

*****

T R Kenneth has long been focused on the Nazi regime and Reinhard Heydrich in particular, a main architect of the Holocaust. In A ROOM FULL OF NIGHT, the author takes the reader from modern flyover America to deep inside the darkest reaches of the Third Reich. Traveling from Berlin to Switzerland, to the beaches of Bali, everyman hero Stag Maguire is forced to confront the shadowed corners of human infamy. In this chilling contemporary thriller, A ROOM FULL OF NIGHT proves the past is inextricably linked with the present, and the insistent whisper all around is merely the truth inside us all.

To learn more about the author and her work, please visit her website.