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by David Mathews

This book is an historical thriller set in the UK in 1944. Britain is occupied by the Germans but the British continue the fight from Canada and, with the help of the USA, plan to invade Britain in 1944. Meanwhile, the Allies send two agents, Major Max Thomson and Sergeant-Major Richard Stevens, to Britain to ‘kidnap’ the UK’s top atomic scientists held by the Germans. It is imperative that the cream of Britain’s atomic scientists are not spirited away to Germany by the Nazis. The British agents are up against two Germans, one of them in counterintelligence and the other in the SS and they meet a host of other characters along the way. The action takes part in Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire and London. The novel is in three parts. In the first, Thomson and Stevens are landed in England and head for Gloucestershire to seize the scientists. In the second, Stevens travels to London to free Thomson’s wife and child who are about to be deported to Germany as a reprisal for a resistance attack on an airfield. In the third section, the four main characters come together for a thrilling climax set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of the UK. When Thomson and Stevens arrive in the UK they have to contend with not only discovery by the German occupying forces, but betrayal by their own countrymen, many of whom have adopted a pacifist or collaborative attitude to an occupation that grinds people down through shortages of food and the basic necessities of life. Thomson is a decent man, struggling to focus on the task in hand after many years of combat; Stevens is a psychotic ex-gangster from London who revels in killing. Both men will be tested by those they thought they could trust.

217 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 31, 2019