I have reviewed many of Rory Clements' wartime spy series on this blog. I have enjoyed them all. This, from 2021, may be the most enjoyable. Clements sticks to his genre; his mastery of period detail is second to none. Sometimes he builds his story around a true historical event, as is the case here, with the death in an RAF flying boat accident over Scotland, of HRH George Duke of Kent in 1942. I was aware of this incident - indeed, I recently watched a TV documentary about it. But I had somehow got it confused with the defection of Rudolf Hess, which was actually the year before. Ah well, Clements has straightened me out.
Any royal death by accident draws conspiracy theorists like flies to marmalade. Clements develops a rather ingenious alternative explanation. Prince George wasn't secretly flying somewhere, he was returning from a secret meeting somewhere. On that simple but brilliant inversion the entire novel is constructed.
Professor Tom Wilde has been seconded from Cambridge to the nascent American OSS in London. With an infant son at home, this puts a massive strain on his domestic arrangements. He gets involved with the case because President Rossevelt wants to pay official American respects to the late Prince, whose own infant son (Prince Michael) is the President's godson. So Tom heads for Scotland with an official guarddog in the shape of gay, dandruff-ridden Walter Quayle. Quayle gets beaten up after propositioning a local lad, which temporarily leave Tom ftee to explore certain anomalies surrounding the crash site. These include another local lad who claims to have found a woman's body there.
In fact Tom has already met the woman in question, who is very much alive. He has also been reunited with her platonic boyfriend, a former student of his, who committed suicide in front of him on a train home to Cambridge. Tom also runs across the young woman's father, the boyfriend's former tutor, whom he finds murdered and dying. Tom is seen covered in the father's blood and therefore becomes the main supsect for the murder.
That's already quite a slice of plot and there are several levels more. Clements handles it all with aplomb. Mainly this is due to his brisk pace - at the end of the day it is, after all, a thriller. There are fascinating minor characters, several of them associated with a colourful London nightspot, based I suspect on David Tennant's legendary Gargoyle Club.
