Hi guys, happy Thursday! We’ve almost done it to the weekend, yay! In the meantime I have a very exciting blog tour for you today – “Corpus” by Rory Clements. The book sounds incredibly intriguing and it already has raving reviews – I personally can’t wait to start reading it! It is already on my bookshelf, but what with time – lack and life generally getting in the way I haven’t started it yet – but am so looking to it! I am sure that after reading the extract that I have a pleasure to post today you’ll be wanting to read it as much as I do!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
1936.
Europe is in turmoil.
The Nazis have marched into the Rhineland.
In Russia, Stalin has unleashed his Great Terror.
Spain has erupted in civil war.
In Berlin, a young Englishwoman 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 British establishment light the touch paper on a conspiracy that will threaten the very heart of government. Even the ancient colleges of Cambridge are not immune to political division. Dons and students must choose 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 history professor finds himself dragged into a world of espionage which, until now, he has only read about in books. But the deeper Thomas Wilde delves, the more he wonders whether the murders are linked to the death of the girl with the silver syringe – and, just as worryingly, to the scandal surrounding King Edward VIII and his mistress Wallis Simpson…
Set against the drumbeat of war and moving from Berlin to Cambridge, from Whitehall to the Kent countryside, and from the Fens to the Aragon Front in Spain, this big canvas international thriller marks the beginning of a major new series from bestselling author Rory Clements.
Berlin, August, 1936
CHAPTER 1
The man was grey-haired, about fifty, and carried a black briefcase. He
wore black trousers, a brown linen jacket, white shirt and striped tie but
no hat. He might have been an office worker, except for the white socks
and brown, open-toed sandals. White socks and sandals. In the middle of
a working day, in the traffic-mad tumult of Potsdamer Platz, in the centre
of Berlin. He was standing beside her at the edge of the pavement, waiting
to cross.
Nancy Hereward turned her head and caught his eye. She stared at him
hard and he looked away. She felt like laughing, but her mouth was dry
and she had a terrible thirst. Surely, if he was following her, he wouldn’t
have made eye contact? Nor would he have dressed so distinctively. If
you were tailing someone, you had to meld into the crowd, not stick out.
A gap opened up between the trams, the buses, the cars and the horsedrawn
carts, and he made a dash for the other side of the road by way of
the clock tower island. Nancy waited.
Ahead of her, a policeman with white gloves was directing the onrush
of vehicles. To her left , two young women in sunglasses were examining
postcards at a newspaper kiosk. They wore flat slip-on shoes and shortsleeved,
calf-length summer dresses, one polka-dot, the other floral,
revealing healthy, tanned forearms. Through the fog of her brain, Nancy’s
first thought was that they must be tourists like her, but they seemed too
confident for that, and their shoes were not designed for tramping across
miles of an alien city. She caught the soft burr of their spoken German.
Their easy sophistication marked them down as bourgeois Berliners, not
provincials.
Nancy realised that she was doing the same to everyone she saw;
assessing them, deciding who they were, what they might be concealing.
Suddenly everyone looked like plainclothes officers. She had an urge to
confront everyone in the crowd and demand of each of them, ‘Are you
secret police? Are you secret police?’ She pulled her sun hat down over
her hair. Her hands were sweaty and her dress clung to her body. She
clutched her slim shoulder-bag closer to her side and walked on.
It was late afternoon but the heat of the day had not yet relented. She
and Lydia had taken the U-Bahn from the Reichssportfeld station at
the Olympic Stadium in the west of the city and had spent two hours
shopping and sightseeing in the broad avenues and boulevards around
Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. Now she had slipped away and
was alone, the map of the streets she must walk down memorised.
The city was full of thousands of tourists, here for the Olympics and
all the fun surrounding the games. No one is following you. She said the
words under her breath. She gripped her hands into fists, then released,
then gripped again. She took deep breaths to calm herself and increased
her pace, trying to make herself look businesslike, less foreign. Less
interesting…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
RORY CLEMENTS won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award in 2010 for his second novel, Revenger. He is the author of the John Shakespeare series of novels which are currently in development for TV by the team behind Poldark and Endeavour. Since 2007, Rory has been writing full-time in a quiet corner of Norfolk, England, where he lives with his family.
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