CORPUS by Rory Clements (Thomas Wilde series)
1936. Europe is in turmoil. The Nazis have marched into the Rhineland, Stalin has unleashed his Great Terror on the Soviet Union, and Spain has erupted in civil war.
In Berlin, a young Englishwoman slips away from the Olympics and evades the Gestapo to deliver vital papers to a Jewish scientist. Within weeks, she is found dead in her Cambridge bedroom, a silver syringe clutched in her fingers.
In a London club, three senior members of the establishment light the touchpaper on a conspiracy that will threaten the lives of royalty and government ministers.
Even the ancient courts of Cambridge University are not immune to the political divisions that threaten the peace of the world. Dons and students all must take a side: right or left, where do you stand?
When a renowned member of the county set and his wife are found horribly murdered, a maverick Cambridge history professor finds himself dragged into a world of espionage which, until now, he has only read about in books.
The deeper Tom Wilde delves, both inside and outside college grounds, the more he wonders whether the murders are linked to the death of the girl with the silver syringe – and, just as worryingly, with the scandal surrounding King Edward VIII and his mistress Wallis Simpson.
But Wilde soon discovers that nothing is as it seems.
Who is friend and who is foe?
What is the truth about the mysterious hunger marcher who begs charity and a bed from his beautiful young neighbour?
And why has a huge consignment of gold, looted from the war-ravaged coffers of Madrid, arrived in a rusting trawler on the isolated coast of Suffolk?
Wilde’s specialist subject is the Elizabethan secret service. With the spires of academia drenched in blood, he must use all the skills he has learnt in his dusty tomes to save the woman he loves and prevent a politically-inspired massacre.
