#BookReview #Ad The English Führer by Rory Clements @ZaffreBooks

About the Book

Autumn 1945 – Off the east coast of England, a Japanese sub surfaces, unloads its mysterious cargo, then blows itself to pieces.

Former spy Professor Tom Wilde is enjoying peacetime in Cambridge, settling back into teaching and family life. Until a call from senior MI5 boss Lord Templeman brings him out of retirement.

A nearby village has been locked down by the military, its residents blighted by a deadly illness. No one is allowed in or out.

There are rumours the Nazi machine is still operational, with links to Unit 731, a notorious Japanese biological warfare research laboratory. But how could they possibly be plotting on British soil – and why?

What’s more, Wilde and Templeman’s names are discovered on a Gestapo kill list. And after a series of assassinations an unthinkable question emerges: could an Englishman be behind the plot?

Format: eARC (400 pages)                Publisher: Zaffre
Publication date: 19th January 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Thriller

Find The English Führer on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

---

My Review

From the moment I read Corpus back in 2017, I knew I was going to love the Tom Wilde series and to my mind it just keeps getting better and better.

The conclusion of the previous book, The Man in the Bunker, saw Wilde involved in the defection of a Soviet intelligence officer and he harbours lingering doubts about the whole affair. Something just doesn’t seem quite right about it. He even begins to doubt those he has previously trusted.

The plot is way too involved to describe without giving spoilers but it includes biological warfare, far right extremism and the impact of the changes in the world order following the end of the Second World War.  Your enemy’s enemy may not always remain your friend. We get a picture of a Britain struggling to reconstruct itself, not just physically – ‘The rubble was still there, the bombed houses had not been rebuilt and water mains went unfixed’ –  but politically and psychologically. ‘The rage on all sides of those whose loved ones were killed by bombs, bullet, fire, water and gas didn’t just vanish like smoke because peace treaties were signed.’

As Rory Clements observes in his afterword to the book, ‘It is a world exhausted by war, desperate for peace – and extremely vulnerable because few have any appetite for further conflict’. This is the foundation upon which the author builds the compelling story at the heart of the book. It involves some extremely nasty goings-on, sadly based on fact.

I was particularly pleased to see Tom’s wife, Lydia, playing a prominent part in the story. She’s a woman trying to balance the responsibilities of motherhood with her ambition to become a doctor as well as battling to overcome the obstacles still in place for women wishing to pursue a career, in particular married women.

Wilde’s investigations involve him in breathless escapes across country in order to escape the agents of a foreign power as well as finding himself accused of murder.  The adjective that immediately sprang to mind was ‘Buchanesque’. (Regular followers of my blog will know I’m a fan of the works of John Buchan.) So I was thrilled when, at one point in the book, the hapless Detective Inspector Shirley, rebukes Wilde, ‘This is a murder enquiry, not The Thirty-Nine Steps’.

The author keeps the action coming and the tension high until the very last page.  If you’re a fan of historical thrillers that combine espionage with adventure then they don’t come better than this.

I received a review copy courtesy of Zaffre via NetGalley.

In three words: Gripping, fast-paced, intriguing

Try something similar: The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan of course!

---

About the Author

Rory Clements was born on the edge of England in Dover. After a career in national newspapers, he now writes full time in a quiet corner of Norfolk, where he lives with his wife, the artist Naomi Clements Wright. He won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award in 2010 for his second novel, Revenger, and the CWA Historical Dagger in 2018 for Nucleus. Three of his other novels – Martyr, Prince and The Heretics – have been shortlisted for awards.

To find out more about his books, join the Rory Clements Readers’ Club via the link in his website. (Photo credit: Author website)

Connect with Rory
Website | Twitter | Facebook