Frederick Troy

As the Luftwaffe make their last desperate assault on the city, Londoners take to the shelters once again and eagerly await the signal for D-Day. In the East End children lead police to a charred, dismembered corpse buried in a bombsite. The victim is German, and it soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary murder.

In April 1956, at the height of the cold war, Khrushchev and Bulganin leaders of the Soviet Union are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be the official bodyguard and to spy on the Soviets. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead in a mutilated state in Portsmouth Harbour. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood and into the dangerous arms of an old flame.

In April 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev and Bulganin, leaders of the Soviet Union, are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be Khrushchev's bodyguard and to spy on him. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead and mutilated beyond recognition in Portsmouth Harbor. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood, and into the dangerous arms of an old flame.

1963. England is about to explode. An ageing hack defects to Russia. A cabinet minister resigns. A young woman takes an overdose. A Harley Street physician blows out his brains. Commander Troy investigates. But what with the sex and the drugs, he finds that he's up to his neck in the mess, personally and professionally. The damn thing might blow up in his face, and the English can be so unforgiving of a good scandal.

Spring 1941: After 10 years spying for the Americans, Wolfgang Stahl disappears during a Berlin air raid. The Germans think he's dead. The British know he's not. But where is he? MI6 convince US Intelligence that Stahl will head for London, and so Captain Cal Cormack, a shy American 'aristocrat', is teamed with Chief Inspector Stilton, fat, 50, and convivial, and between them they scour London.

A new breed of gangster appears and the battle for the East End begins. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy is quite literally caught in the crossfire, when he is hit by the blast from a car bomb.

March 1938. The Germans take Vienns without a shot being fired. Covering Austria for the English press is a young journalist named Rod Troy. Back home his younger brother joins the CID as a detective-constable. November 1938. Kristallnacht. The Jews leave Vienns-Sigmund Freud with an American escort on a sleeoer train, Josef Hummel tied to the underside of a box car.

Lawton's novel opens in 1938 with Europe on the brink of war. In London, Frederick Troy, newly promoted to the prestigious Murder Squad at Scotland Yard, is put in charge of rounding up a list of German and Italian "enemy aliens" that also includes Frederick's brother, Rod, who learns upon receiving an internment letter that despite having grown up in England he is Austrian-born. Hundreds of men are herded by train to a neglected camp on the Isle of Man. And, as the bombs start falling on London, a murdered rabbi is found, then another, and another.

Meret Voytek, pupil of professor Viktor Rosen, a Jew in exile from Germany, watches as Vienna comes under Nazi rule and the repercussions for the Jews. Across Europe, Dr Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist, has been interned on the Isle of Man. Rescued by the Americans, they recruit him in building an atomic bomb. Moving from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico to London, fate carries the enemy alien, Szabo and gentile Voytek, across the battlefields of the destructive war.

John Lawton's A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters - Meret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel's start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home.