Robert Harris writes about a Nazi victory in Europe in suspenseful, in-depth book

FATHERLAND, by Robert Harris, Random House, 338 pages, $21.

Berlin, 1964: President Kennedy — that’s Joseph P., not John F. — is coming to town to meet with the Fuhrer.

The grand city, the center of the German Reich, is preparing for the event, the apparent end of a long estrangement that began at the end of World War II with the Nazi victory in Europe. Meanwhile, Detective Xavier March has found a body, an older man who washed up on the shore of the river.

After a little checking, March discovers the dead man is a former high official in the Nazi Party. A little more checking uncovers a startling fact — many of the man’s colleagues from the war also have died in mysterious ways in recent years. All have a fatal disease: each were privy to the deepest secret of the Nazi Empire.

In “Fatherland,” Robert Harris has accomplished what many writers have dreamed of for half a century — writing a novel based on the premise that Adolf Hitler not only survived the war, but won it as well.

In Harris’ Germany, Hitler is aging, but the Reich is still young, flourishing in the infancy of its 1,000-year reign. Churchill and the monarchy are retired in Canada, having fled from the Nazi invasion of England.

Harris, a columnist for the London Sunday Times and the former political editor of the London Observer, weaves a heavy load of fact into his fiction. Joseph P. Kennedy, unlike his son, was known as a Nazi appeaser during his tenure as ambassador to Great Britain in the prewar years. And, many other parts of the novel also are taken from history, at least up until the mid-1940s, when luck began to run out on Nazi Germany.

One of the more fascinating elements of “Fatherland” is the description of the Reich’s seat of government — a 400-foot-high Arch of Triumph, a massive palace for Hitler, and a 1,000-foot Great Hall designed to hold 150,000 people — a structure so massive that the breath from the audience would condense in the dome and fall as a light mist on the people below. Again, these grand designs were actually on the drawing board of Albert Speer, who didn’t live to see his plans come to fruition.

Climbing on the best-seller lists, “Fatherland” is well worth the investment of time needed to read it. Kennedy and Hitler remain in the background, and never really surface. The spotlight is on March, an overworked investigator whose penchant for digging into cases has cost him a marriage and the increasing scorn of party officials.

“Fatherland” is part “1984,” part history, part new and original fiction. Harris’ trick is putting them together, and he does so in a well-paced, in-depth, and suspenseful work.

John Ripley is a reporter on the NEWS Government and Politics Desk.