Corpus, Nucleus, Nemesis, Hitler’s Secret, A Prince and a Spy, The Man in the Bunker, The English Fuhrer
Another binge read of a series! I did read A Prince and a Spy back in 2022 having picked it up without realising it was a book in the middle of a series.
The basic premise of the series is that Tom Wilde is a history professor at Cambridge. He is a US citizen but has settled in England. The series starts in 1936 and has got as far as autumn 1945.
Tom starts as an accidental investigator, looking into the death of his neighbour’s friend and ends up as a reluctant investigator and spy for the USA.
The series covers the Abdication crisis, the development of the atomic bomb, IRA activity, the fallout from the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Nazism, the death of Geli Raubels, the death of the Duke of Kent, the aftermath of WWII and post-war fascist conspiracies.
The books, and the series, trots along at a good pace. They are, for me, good downtime reading: great for curling up on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon with a nice glass of wine.
Generally, Clements is good at planting red herrings and, even binge reading the books, I didn’t always work out who were the red herrings and who were actually the bad guys. There is a good level of realism – sometimes too much when torture is described!
The less good bits were that sometimes the endings felt a bit hurried and unfinished, too many dodgy things going on around Cambridge, Lydia, Wilde’s feisty partner, has become sidelined as a domestic and that Dagger Templeman and Tom sudden seem to have become best buddies, which doesn’t ring true.
Overall, if you enjoy a good period murder mystery series, this is a good one.
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