THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4), interwar Bonding

THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4)
WILLIAM FERNIE
Fernie Publishing Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Before the Luftwaffe terrorised Europe, it was forged in secrecy.

In the uneasy peace before WWII, Captain Tom Munro is flying for Deutsche Luft Hansa when he uncovers a clandestine military airfield hidden deep within Soviet Russia.

Coerced into supporting Germany's secret rearmament programme, he risks his life flying experimental aircraft and developing new, untested operational techniques all prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles. This test flying provides a unique opportunity to gather military intelligence of immense value to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

But Tom knows that he will not be allowed to survive with this vital intelligence and must attempt the impossible: escape with Germany's secrets before he disappears forever.

An interwar aviation/espionage thriller for readers of David Downing, Philip Kerr and Robert Harris.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tom Munro is a very enjoyable PoV to follow as this based-on-facts thriller of Nazi Germany's preparations for war in the air. The prior three volumes in the series deal with the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles era, and now the period that enables the rise of the Nazi state.

It's a period I'm very interested in, and one that saw gigantic advances inn aeronautical engineering, materials science, and other sciences that are useful in wartime. As always it's the horrors of slaughter that drive change, and the economy's growth, and the terrible Othering of people in no way wrong, bad, or evil as the scum at the top try to justify the war "They" want by manufacturing enemies within and without.

What makes Tom fun to follow is mostly his test-pilot nous. It's fun for me to read about the planes realy being tested, really being studied in this pre-Depression time that has so much hope for a peaceful future that recedes and recedes while Tom and his ilk try to keep it alive. Yet here he is flying violation-of-treaty equipment to a secret base! One in Russia, no less...more serious skulduggery...and consequences for Tom in terms of using spycraft for...good?

Come for the history, stay for the gearhead talk, which you'll need to be getting along with that to be in the full story. I was captivated, you might not be, so be aware the jargon is plentiful and needed to make sense of the Lipetsk Russian airfield subplot. There are many politicosocial developments but they almost all incorporate technology and discussion of same.

There is yearning for his lost, belovèd fellow spy Alice, which is getting a bit wearing if I'm honest. Oh well. One must have a woman in a thriller, she motivates the main man. *sigh*

A complex and very very sensitive matter, Germany's resurgent ambitions and rebounding desire to lead the technological world, and the worries of her very recent opponents all buried in piles of dead people from that stupid war. And an ending to this story that's exactly right. All designed to give this old man reader the happy.

Be ready for the complexities on multiple fronts and it might do the same trick for you.

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE, charming Regency spy story seasoned with gayness

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE
SARAH GRANGER
Entangled: Select Historical (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A French musket ball to the leg takes Captain Hugh Fanshawe from the battlefield and leaves him enduring long, quiet days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters. He knows his lameness makes him the object of pity and distaste at the stifling social engagements he dutifully escorts his mother and sister to, but everything in his orderly life changes when Colonel Theo Lindsay arrives.

Theo is everything Hugh is not. He’s a man of physical perfection and an enjoyable companion, and their friendship deepens into love. But when the army suspects there’s a French spy at Horse Guards, Hugh discovers nothing is as it seems, and the paper he shuffles daily could save his lover’s life.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: A steamless spy drama set in an underused Napoleonic Wars setting, with a lovely little gay romance on top of it. The men who fall in love aren't in rut, they're in a more Heyeresque kind of connection. The author uses on-page euphemism, as opposed to more old-fashioned "the fire flickered and died," to gloss over the physicality of sexual activity. Even a visit to a molly-house is...social, not exclusively sexual. Hugh meets Theo there, yet does not connect this to Theo's later act of seeking him out at the workplace they share.

It is the kind of story I enjoy, set in what feels like a reasonably accurate Regency re-creation. I didn't point and laugh at the...heightened...Heyerlike language, which is a feat. Trying to make champagne with Thompson seedless grapes is usually how the imitators come across; Author Granger, not so much. The spirited exchanges are there to keep me entertained while thinking "shouldn't they be fucking?"

If you're not interested in the steamier side of a story, this one will keep you busy with Hugh's idolizing of Theo as a dashing, omnicompetent godlike beauty. With his serious self-image problems. With his wounded-warrior syndrome. There is a lot to be recovering from after being crippled by a war wound, and by a lifetime of being told you're wrong just for existing.

Add in some amusing family shenanigans (his younger sister keeps Hugh and his mother on the hop, steering her away from trouble), and there was enough oddness with his friend Emily and her ambiguously intentioned attention to him to keep subplots going.

What there is not is the always desirable HEA, because that was not on offer in 1810s England. If Hugh and Thheo transgress bounds of propriety in their attention to each other, they face dreadful consequences. This results in HFN endings being the best one can hope for in this milieu...if that's a deal-breaker, be alert for it now.

A good historical story without sexual content beyond social bounds.

THIS MARLOWE, an historical novel of espionage, treason, suborned honor, and gay love

THIS MARLOWE
MICHELLE BUTLER HALLETT
Goose Lane Editions
$22.95 paperback edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: 1593. Queen Elizabeth reigns from the throne while two rival spymasters Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex plot from the shadows. Their goal? To control succession upon the aged queen's death. The man on which their schemes depend? Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler's son from Canterbury who has defied expectations and become an accomplished poet and playwright. Now that the plague has closed theatres, Marlowe must resume the work for which he was originally recruited: intelligence and espionage.

Fighting to stay one step ahead in a dizzying game that threatens the lives of those he holds most dear, Marlowe comes to question his allegiances and nearly everything he once believed. As tensions mount, he is tossed into an impossible bind. He must choose between paths that lead either to wretched guilt and miserable death or to love and honour.

An historical novel with a contemporary edge, This Marlowe measures the weight of the body politic, the torment of the flesh, and the state of the soul.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kit, as the narrator of this delight of a tale thinks of himself, is (all unknowing, as are we all) approaching the end of his life. We know this so we're listening on on his thoughts, viewing his activities, with an odd finality that lends them extra poignance: seeing a man's ego up close is often off-putting, but seeing it knowing the trap it's led him into, knowing it's not in him to see the trap and escape it...very intense, and in Author Hallett's capable hands, deeply moving.

This Marlowe is fleshing out the sketchy official record of Kit's entanglement in Elizabeth Tudor's complex web of overlapping espionage networks domestic and foreign. Stories are always built on some rock of reality or another, they can't nucleate otherwise (all y'all blocked novelists make a note of that). Choosing Marlowe's fairly scanty official records as a launching point for the fleshed-out myth of the playwright's life was savvy. Author Hallett succeeds in stitching the myth, the records, and the ideas that bridge them into a tapestry. It would be easy to make an attractive quilt for any author of sensitivity. Author Hallett unpicks each existing strand of story-stuff, then reweaves them into a satisfying whole with an almost Biblical sweep.

That whole is not a sweetness-and-light New Testament scene, but a sturm-und-drang Old Testament screamfest. There is intensity in any Tudor era story, it was a paranoid police state doing its awful worst to scare people into surface conformity via constant surveillance and disproportionate punishment for disobedience. Their external enemies were determinedly sabotaging the regime's efforts to establish a new normal, to refashion the rituals of daily life to reflect a manufactured consensus that was different from the old one (therefore better, obviously). Kit's incredible rise depended on that new consensus succeding. His loyalty was assumed to be absolute.

Many of y'all have heard of Marlowe solely in relation to Shakespeare...lots of you are now picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love when thinking of Kit Marlowe. *swoon* so pretty *ahem* So Mrlowe was Shakespeare's role model in the sense that he was more successful as a playwright when Shakespeare was a tyro. Marlowe began life as a cobbler's son, somehow becoming a university graduate in a time when not even that many noblemen's sons could claim a degree. Then as now, there are those whose innate gifts gain them access to education and the rewards thereof...and the notice from the Powers That Be. Marlowe's life was charmed, as Author Hallett's storytelling shows us, and wasn't he just the smartest manipulator of the system! Didn't he just make it his business to know and be known to the greatest and goodest he could reach! If they needed an intelligent pair of eyes to suss out the secrets, the plans, the sort of things a man would say to a pretty, talented, intelligent, pliant catamite...well, Kit lived to serve.

Never for a moment believing that service would not buy loyalty and protection.

It's a story that never stops being relevant, isn't it...and one we would all do well to heed in parlous times.