The second book in the Tom Wilde series does not disappoint. It is every bit as clever and fast-paced as “Corpus” and set in the same time period, those heady but menacing months leading up to the start of World War II.
Tom Wilde, an Irish-American history professor at Cambridge, is a good, decent, principled man, who has become an unofficial spy for…well not for the British, officially. And not for the Americans, officially. But with his loathing of the rising power and virulent anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, Tom is on the side of the truth.
Mr. Clements skilfully weaves together many story lines and plot threads, and it is only as the book progresses that you see how inter-connected the different threads of the narrative are. He combines political fact with political fiction and a burgeoning romance, all set against the backdrop of Cambridge in the early summer. Undergraduates go to May Balls, people punt and picnic, and the threat of war looms ever more frighteningly on the sunny horizon.
In Lydia and Tom we have a couple who are both intellectuals and highly principled people, but also slightly hot-headed, impetuous and reckless. A heady combination.
As I did after reading “Corpus”, I instantly sat down to Google which parts of the novel are fact and which are fiction. Mr. Clements is such a skilled writer that history comes alive as he writes, against the backdrop of the persecution of Germany’s Jews, and the race to manufacture the atom bomb.
Fascinating, informative and also a great page-turner.