The 51st State

It’s early autumn 1941, 15 months after the debacle at Dunkirk, the fall of France and the successful Nazi invasion of Britain. King Edward VIII is back on the throne, albeit as a puppet King with no influence. He has returned to a devastated London.King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill are a monarch and government-in-exile in Canada, but the Prime Minister has not given up the fight.The new British government, answerable to Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, is headed by Lord Halifax. His cabinet is dominated by former members of the British Union of Fascists.Across the Atlantic, President Franklin D. Roosevelt is collaborating with Churchill and providing materiel for British forces stationed around the world. He is expecting Japan to declare war any day and needs to decide whether to withdraw the American Pacific fleet from Pearl Harbor.On the Eastern Front Red Army commanders, having forced Premier Josef Stalin to commit suicide, have managed to stall Germany’s advance 100 miles from Moscow. Adolf Hitler has blamed his generals unaware that some of his most senior officers are planning to assassinate him in a plot named Operation Valkyrie. Life in South Devon has returned to a ’new normal.’ Rupert Tremaine has happily returned to edit the Torquay Chronicle after a year at Buckingham Palace as the King’s private secretary. However, the peace and tranquillity of post-war Britain is shattered when the first concentration camp is built on Dartmoor and Himmler’s infamous Einsatzgruppen death squads arrive to ’cleanse’ the country of Jews and other ’undesirables.’  Rupert is about to be tested as to his true loyalties. Will he continue to serve Himmler’s spymaster Julius Luther, head of the Gestapo in Britain, or will he become a double agent and work for ’Buster’ an organisation of former MI5 and MI6 agents loyal to Churchill?