The Tom Wilde series by Rory Clements

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.

A Prince and a Spy by Rory Clements

I know Rory Clements from his John Shakespeare novels: William Shakespeare’s brother as an intelligencer working for Sir Francis Walsingham. I picked up this book as a 99p Kindle deal thinking it would be another in the series.

It is, in fact, set in World War II and the chief character is Professor Tom Wilde. He is ostensibly a Cambridge professor whilst also working for the new American Intelligence Bureau in London. It turns out that this is the fourth book in the series. I hadn’t realised this before reading it and it explains why certain things in the story didn’t quite make sense.

The central story centres round the death of George, Duke of Kent, in a flying accident. The President of USA isn’t convinced he is being told the full story so dispatches Professor Wilde to find out what really happened.

I liked the fact that the story is loosely based on real events. I enjoyed the plot and the way Tom and the mysterious Harriet worked together and pieced everything together.

After I’d finished the book, I was a bit frustrated about the bits of the story that didn’t hang together – primarily around the Cambridge sections and Tom’s relationship with Lydia. Now I know this isn’t the first book in the series I think I need to go back to the beginning and bring myself up to this book before passing judgement on the characters.

And I enjoyed this book enough to want to go back to the three earlier books. It was a pleasant way to spend a couple of afternoons.