Code Name: Casket

by David Turri

In March 1940, the division of MI5 tasked with capturing German agents infiltrated into England and turning them back against their Abwehr masters gets its hands on Ray Swindon, London hardman – code-named Casket. Swindon leads his MI5 controllers to two other in-place German agents. For the next several months, the Casket ring feeds a steady stream of misinformation to the Hamburg Stelle. Then, in order to boost Casket’s credentials with Hamburg, MI5 mounts a controlled-sabotage operation at a bomber manufacturing plant. It goes wrong; many people are killed. The public of Great Britain demands the capture of the perpetrators. The three spies in the Casket ring are brought from the facility where they have been imprisoned since their capture and sacrificed to conceal the involvement of MI5 operatives in the tragedy. But Casket escapes. In the hunt for him, the scene shifts from Blitz-torn London to the U-boat infested Atlantic, to the Rock of Gibraltar and finally to a bloody climax in the dusty country lanes of the Spanish port of Algeciras.

249 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 24, 2020

About the author

David Turri was born in Liverpool in the 1950s and grew up in New Zealand. After living in Barcelona for a few years, he settled down permanently in Japan, where he is surrounded by a noisy harem of wife, two grown daughters and two granddaughters. He has been writing most of his life – textbooks for the English language industry, which industry pays the rent and puts food on the table; and fiction. In spite of his wife’s unspoken belief that his novels would only be published posthumously, one was actually published two years ago. “Damaged Cargoes” is an historical story about child trafficking and opium set in Kobe in 1870. Another novel, an occult story titled “29 Argyle Drive”, was published last year and is proving popular among Amazon horror fans. It is set in Christchurch, where he grew up, against the background of the earthquake that destroyed the city in 2011. A third book (“Escarpment”) will appear shortly. This is a strange mixture of humor, occult and war and focuses on the Battle of Okinawa. When not writing at the computer, he spends most of his evenings scribbling in parks near his home; where a bench is his outdoor office, a bottle of wine fuels his imagination and the prose flows from his pen into a notebook among the mosquitoes.