reviewed live on bookshow by Brian Lowen on 29th august 2013
Marian Sutro is
half French and half British, and as she speaks fluent French she is
recruited by the British Secret Service
to go undercover in France during the second world war.
The story takes us
through all her training in a remote house in Scotland before she is finally
accepted as being suitable to be an agent working with the Resistance in
France.
She soon finds
herself parachuting into south-west France, having been trained in sabotage,
how to perform under interrogation and how to kill.
Her real
destination, however is occupied Paris, where she must seek out an old family
friend, Clement Pelleteir, a nuclear Physicist, whose expertise is in urgent
need back in England.
She makes contact
with the local resistance group and arranges drops of supplies from England.
She eventually gets to Paris and finds Clement and also Yvette, with whom she
trained back in England. The group that she was part of in Paris have all been
captured, so Marian tries to arrange for her to escape back to England with
Clement, who has agreed to go.
The story gives a
good idea what life must have been like in occupied Paris with very little food
to eat and always looking behind you to check if you were being followed. You
are not able to trust anyone and Marian has to use her training in how to
kill. Life was much easier in the
countryside where at least you had reasonable food, but all life’s little
luxuries had disappeared.
A good story, but
it did not grip me as much as similar stories by other authors on this subject,
ie Ken Follett and Leslie Thomas.
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