Rupert Crown is a bright but unworldly eleven-year-old in his first year of grammar school in the midlands town in the mid-1950s, and is experiencing more than his share of trials of life. Book themes: family and other relationships, bullying, hope

James Bond meets Maisie Dobbs in this riveting new historical caper series featuring a gifted young socialist-turned-counterespionage spy on a World War II mission orchestrated by Winston Churchill himself… 1940: Weeks after the evacuation of Dunkirk, Germany is poised to invade a near-defenseless Britain. To safeguard the Crown Jewels from the Nazis, Winston Churchill devises a daring gamble to have them shipped overseas. The priceless artifacts will be secretly removed from the Tower of London and driven north to Scotland by two operatives posing as a young married couple, to be taken from there to Canada. Caitrin Colline—a Welsh coalminer’s daughter and an ardent socialist—will play the wife of Lord Marlton, Hector Neville-Percy. A less likely couple is at first difficult to imagine. Yet Caitrin’s bold, streetwise confidence and sharp wits complement Hector’s social ease and connections, essential to a second part of their mission: uncovering Nazi sympathizers within the highest ranks of Britain’s aristocracy. Battling enemies within and without, Caitrin wonders if anyone in their circle can be trusted—even her partner. And when unexpected events catapult her into a life-or-death chase across the continent, the morale of a nation and the fate of Europe itself in the balance.

During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war--the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front. The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.