Review: Women of the Anarchy by Sharon Bennett Connolly

  I'll be honest - even though I studied history right through school and then at University, I never learned about the period in Englis...

Monday 27 April 2020

Review: Liberation by Imogen Kealey

I've been reading an awful lot of books recently - and trying to move away from my usual preferred time period. Last weekend I read the new book from Imogen Kealey* and I'm glad to say that moving out of my 'comfort zone' was rewarding indeed.



"To the Allies she was a fearless freedom fighter, special operations super spy, a woman ahead of her time. To the Gestapo she was a ghost, a shadow, the most wanted person in the world with a five-million-Franc bounty on her head.
Her name was Nancy Wake.
Now, for the first time, the roots of her legend are told in a thriller about one woman's incredible quest to turn the tide of the war, save the man she loves and take brutal revenge on those who have wronged her."

I was vaguely aware of  Nancy Wake aka Madame Fiocca, but I didn't know enough about her life to know whether she even survived the war, so for me there was added drama and tension as I had no idea what was going to happen to her or her husband Henri. 

The book drops us straight into the action, and we meet Nancy trying to evade the Germans as she scoots across Marseille and witnesses a brutal murder. From then on, the pace barely lets up and this is a very fast-paced read indeed. It was hard to relax even for a moment as the tension never really eases off and the action scenes - of which there are many - were real page-turners. 

There's a good sense of time, place, and - always - danger. Reading it, I stayed constantly alert, which heightened the effect and gave perhaps just a glimpse of what life was really like for the resistance fighters. Just a glimpse, though, because the reality must have been even worse. You need a strong stomach to read it but that's an easy job compared with what these people went through.


The real Nancy Wake - public domain image

Throughout the book, Nancy is aware that her husband has been captured by the Gestapo but she doesn't know what's happened to him, and neither do we. Again, this device, of not letting the reader know his fate, ratchets up the tension, although, as I said, I wasn't aware of the real outcome and others might be.

On the other hand, the authors have taken some licence and altered the timeline and some key events. I suspect they had good reason for doing so and perhaps it allowed them to give better shape to the plot and story arc. It didn't bother me at all, and notes are given at the back of the book.

Some readers might be surprised at how 'sweary' Nancy can be, but I put that down to her being a New Zealander with none of the quintessential English reserve. 


Just below the blurb on the Amazon page it says: "Soon to be a major blockbuster film." I'm not surprised. I think this book will make a terrific film. Nancy, her friends and comrades, and her experiences as portrayed here, will stay with me for a long time.

Amazon Links   US   UK

*the authors are Darby Kealey & Imogen Robertson

Friday 10 April 2020

Detective Work - How History can Help

I've recently finished a fascinating book. Not my usual reading fare, but lately I've been enjoying books set in the US and have really enjoyed them. Not ones set in the big cities, but the smaller towns. It's somewhere I can float to in my imagination as I'm reading, especially when the descriptions are of long summer evenings and hot-baked roads. What can I say, I'm a lover of summer sunshine and heat! I like it when words like 'languid' come to mind.


So it was that I bought Poison Branches by Cynthia Raleigh. It's mainly set in Kentucky and from almost the very first scene, where the main character thinks about putting the A/C on in the car, I wiggled my toes at the imagined warmth of the air outside.

But, that's not what this book is about. It's essentially a murder mystery, and it's done well. I didn't know whodunnit, not until the final scenes which become a tense, page-turning race against time, but most of the mystery is solved by a particular type of detective work: genealogy.

Perri Seamore is a keen genealogist and so, it seems were at least one of the murder victims. She's brought onto the case by the local Police Department to see if there are clues in the victim's family tree which might help solve the case. 

So it's detective work, but it's also history. Scanning documents - by eye, and with a machine - to search for clues among the lives of real people, most of whom lived a century or more ago is a painstaking but often rewarding task. Whether we do it because we're interested in our own family, or whether we do it because we're writing historical fiction or even nonfiction, the work of the historian, the genealogist, and the police detective all have elements in common.


I've recently been designated keeper of our family records, which include indenture certificates dating to the reign of George III and I'm itching to find out more. I spend a lot of time delving into other people's family trees when I'm writing my fiction and nonfiction. There's added interest when it's personal, and I know of another author, Elizabeth St John, who used a 400-year-old family diary as the basis for her trilogy. (I've read all three books, by the way, and they are superb.)

In Poison Branches, Perri uses her skills and knowledge to find out what the local detective can't, because she has neither the time nor experience. Thus Perri becomes an amateur sleuth and this is Book One of a series, so I expect that Perri will have more such adventures. This book isn't 'just' a murder mystery though; I loved the relationship between Perri and her best friend. The warmth of their friendship and the strength of their bond shone through, from gentle teasing to outright worry once the situation gets a little intense.

I really felt that I couldn't turn the page - or rather, tap the kindle - fast enough when the murderer was revealed. The pacing was superb, the outcome far from obvious and ... well, no spoilers here.

As well as allowing me to enjoy a great story, it also made me stop to think about the satisfying work of the historian, and about how much we can learn from family history generally - for good, or bad.