Novels

Thurlow’s War

Coming April 22

Long before World War Two comes to the US, Will Thurlow flies and fights, first for Republican Spain, then with the Chinese against Japan. Even before Pearl Harbor, he moves on to serving with the Flying Tigers. These assignments expose Thurlow to repeated dangers, not just from enemy action, but from someone on his own side, trying to get him killed. His suspicions are confirmed by his lover, Wendy, a half-caste Chinese spy, as she lies dying in a hospital after escaping the Japanese.

When the Flying Tigers are absorbed into the US Air Corps, the War department unaccountably reaches down to transfer Thurlow to Britain. There he is kept leading the least experienced B-17 crews on the most dangerous bomber missions.  It becomes obvious to him that someone in the War Department is trying hard to get him killed in action. In London he meets and falls in love with Ellen, a civil-servant working on the effectiveness of strategic bombing of German. After too many missions Thurlow is finally shot down over Germany. Anti-Nazi elements in German intelligence help him get back to Britain with information that could make the strategic bombing campaign against Germany much more effective. Thurlow and the Brits have to find a way to get the Air Force high command to change targeting.

As an escapee, he is not allowed to fly bomber missions again. Instead of a staff job, Thurlow is immediately shipped out to the Pacific. Whoever has been trying to get him killed flying bomber missions is still at it. It’s 1944 and in New Guinea Thurlow is flying P-38 fighters, and still not beyond the reach of whoever has been trying to have him die in action.  It’s now that he finally comes face to face with the powerful American who’d been pulling strings to get him killed for the last 5 years.

In the Shadow of Enigma

A stand-alone sequel to The Girl from Krakow, the best-selling novel of the ‘30s and the war in Europe.

The War’s Greatest Secret stalks the woman who bears it across three continents and 20 years.

The only second world war secret not revealed soon thereafter was that the western Allies had broken the German Enigma codes. This secret was kept for 30 years after the war. This sequel to The Girl from Krakow follows the trajectory of how knowing this secret changes the lives of four people, Rita Feuerstahl, who learned of it in a wartime Polish Ghetto, Gil Romero, her prewar lover with whom she reunites after the war, Otto Schulke, the former Gestapo detective who has suspected Rita’s secret all along, and Rita’s infant son Stefan, smuggled from the Ghetto and lost in the war’s turmoil. Spanning post war Europe, Australia and the US, all the threads come together as Soviet and West German agents converge on New York in the midst of the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.

The Girl from Krakow

It’s 1935. Rita Feuerstahl comes to the university in Krakow intent on enjoying her freedom. But life has other things in store—marriage, a love affair, a child, all in the shadows of the oncoming war. When the war arrives, Rita is armed with a secret so enormous that it could cost the Allies everything, even as it gives her the will to live. She must find a way both to keep her secret and to survive amid the chaos of Europe at war. Living by her wits among the Germans as their conquests turn to defeat, she seeks a way to prevent the inevitable doom of Nazism from making her one of its last victims. Can her passion and resolve outlast the most powerful evil that Europe has ever seen? In an epic saga that spans from Paris in the ’30s and Spain’s Civil War to Moscow, Warsaw, and the heart of Nazi Germany, The Girl from Krakow follows one woman’s battle for survival as entire nations are torn apart, never to be the same.

Autumn in Oxford

After being blacklisted for having communist sympathies as a student twenty years before, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Tom Wrought escapes America’s Cold War climate to teach at Oxford. There, he falls in love with Liz Spencer, a beautiful married woman. When Liz’s husband is pushed in front of a train in the London Underground, Tom is immediately arrested for the murder. Scotland Yard is convinced it has its man, as he had means, motive, and opportunity. Certain of his innocence, Liz hires a young solicitor, Alice Silverstone, to defend Tom. But they discover that Tom’s former secret work as an American spy made him a number of powerful enemies. Russian intelligence, British counterespionage, and even the FBI all may have reason to frame him. If Liz and Alice can find out who is behind the murder, they stand a chance of freeing Tom, but doing so puts all their lives at risk.

The Intrigues of Jennie Lee

A gripping and evocative story of love, politics, betrayal and bravery, which reimagines events of the interwar years. Jennie Lee was elected to parliament aged just twenty-four, five years too young even to vote in 1929 Britain. From the Labour backbenches, she hurled barbs and bolts of thunder at the likes of Winston Churchill, Lady Astor, even her own party’s Prime Minister, Ramsay McDonald. The novel intertwines real events with a personal story involving Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons, the future Queen Mother; the womanizing fascist Oswald Mosley; the Great War prime minister Lloyd-George; and the radical Labour MP Aneurin Bevan. A series of political and intimate intrigues turn history into thriller when Jennie has the chance to radically change the course of history for Britain, Europe and the world.