A mystery of oil, espionage, and murder in the last spring before the war.
March 1939. Reginald Hargrove, brought onto a secret committee charged with keeping Britain's ships and aircraft supplied with oil, sits down to a private supper with the men he is sworn to trust. By the end of the meal, one of them is dead.
Arthur Drummond knew where every drop of Britain's fuel was going. Tonight he was poisoned in his chair — between the candles and the good china, in a room where every guest had a secret to guard. The killer is still at the table. And the tankers are still going down.
Hargrove has unravelled cases that defeated Scotland Yard. He has never had one among the colleagues he has worked beside through the long slide into war, and he has never had to weigh how many lives are bought with each thing he chooses not to say.
One man spent years warning them what the oil was costing. Another made certain no one listened. Tonight, someone closed the account.
But the truth, when Hargrove finds it, runs from a Kent stream that no longer flows clean to the bottom of the winter sea. The hardest question isn't who poisoned Arthur Drummond. It's what that death was meant to hide, and what it will cost to bring it into the light.
Genre: Thriller
March 1939. Reginald Hargrove, brought onto a secret committee charged with keeping Britain's ships and aircraft supplied with oil, sits down to a private supper with the men he is sworn to trust. By the end of the meal, one of them is dead.
Arthur Drummond knew where every drop of Britain's fuel was going. Tonight he was poisoned in his chair — between the candles and the good china, in a room where every guest had a secret to guard. The killer is still at the table. And the tankers are still going down.
Hargrove has unravelled cases that defeated Scotland Yard. He has never had one among the colleagues he has worked beside through the long slide into war, and he has never had to weigh how many lives are bought with each thing he chooses not to say.
One man spent years warning them what the oil was costing. Another made certain no one listened. Tonight, someone closed the account.
But the truth, when Hargrove finds it, runs from a Kent stream that no longer flows clean to the bottom of the winter sea. The hardest question isn't who poisoned Arthur Drummond. It's what that death was meant to hide, and what it will cost to bring it into the light.
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Peter G Thompson's Crude Shadows