“If the previous seven installments in John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series haven’t made the point adequately, the eighth, A Lily of the Field, makes it again, and solidly: Lawton’s thrillers provide a vivid, moving and wonderfully absorbing way to experience life in London and on the Continent before, during and after World War II.” —Gerald Bartell, Washington Post

“Readers will enjoy this profound tale that takes the audience from the beginning of the Nazi aggression into the beginning of the Cold War.” —Harriet Klausner, The Midwest Book Review

“Is there any genre convention John Lawton hasn’t boldly disregarded, often to brilliant effect? While ostensibly grounded in post-World War II London, his elegant police procedurals featuring Inspector Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard succeed in traversing fluid timelines. His characters have solid fictional substance, even as they routinely interact with real-life figures to insinuate themselves into critical events in history. And although Inspector Troy observes the basic investigative procedures, Lawton is quick to discard them when he wants to expand his crime narratives into international espionage thrillers.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

“The best yet in a consistently strong series. Lawton has always pushed the boundaries of the series crime novel, edging ever closer to broad-canvas historical fiction, but this time he has leaped the fence altogether. Like Dennis Lehane in The Given Day (2008), Lawton introduces multiple characters and stories in a sweeping tale that comes together at a particular historical moment, but unlike Lehane, he does all that without abandoning his series hero or the continuity established in the previous volumes . . . a truly multi-textured tale.” —Booklist (Starred Review)

“Mystery fans—if you haven’t checked out this British author’s Inspector Troy novels, you’re in for a treat.” —The Seattle Times

“A complex and compelling mystery that will not be forgotten quickly. Highly recommended.” —Roland Person, Library Journal

“Top-Notch Police/Esionage . . . such a grand tapestry with so much vibrant color and form that the book belongs on the shelf squarely between John Le Carré and Alan Furst, embracing both the stunned pain of England and the dark desperation of the rest of Europe during and immediately after the war . . . There are enough layers, and enough beautifully wrought satisfactions, that this book goes onto my ‘desert island’ list: a book I’d be willing to read multiple times.” —Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books

“Lawton deftly lays out Europe as it changed, with all of its intimate costs exposed.” —Clea Simon, The Boston Phoenix

He took a silver hip flask from his inside pocket and downed a little Armagnac.

“André, I cannot do this anymore.”

Skolnik had been pretending to read the Post, billowing pages spread out in front of him screening his face from the drifting gaze of passersby. He stopped, turned his head to look directly at Viktor.

“What?”

“I have to stop now.”

The newspaper was folded for maximum rustle. It conveyed the emotions André pretended long ago to have disowned in favor of calm, unrufflable detachment.

“Viktor. You cannot just stop. You cannot simply quit. What was it you think you joined all those years ago? A gentleman’s club? As though you can turn in your membership when brandy and billiards begin to bore you?”

Viktor took another sip of Armagnac, then passed the flask to André.

“Nineteen eighteen,” he said softly as Skolnik helped himself to a hefty swig. “Nineteen eighteen.”

“What?”

“Nineteen eighteen—that’s when I joined. Were you even born then?”

“Not that it matters, but I was at school.”

The flask was handed back, the paper slapped down between them.

“You cannot stop just because it suits you to stop.”

Viktor sighed a soft, whispery, “Really,” of exasperation. “Why can I not stop?”

“Because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union simply doesn’t work that way.”

Audacity

I would love to be like the lilies of the field.

Someone who managed to read this age correctly would surely have learned just this: to be like a lily of the field.

ETTY HILLESUM, diary entry for SEPTEMBER 22, 1943 (died Auschwitz NOVEMBER 30, 1943), Etty: A Diary (published 1981)

Vienna: February 9, 1934

The war began as a whisper—a creeping sussurus that she came to hear in every corner of her childhood—by the time it finally banged on the door and rattled the windows it had come to seem like nature itself. It had always been there, whispered, hinted, spoken, bawled. It was the inevitable, it was the way things were—like winter or spring.

There was a whisper of war. Even at ten years old Méret could hear it. Her father had come home from the theatre a year ago, slapped the paper down on the dining table, and in his rant against “this buffoon Hitler” had forgotten to kiss her. He always kissed her when he came home from work. The first thing he did, even before he kissed his wife. It coincided with Méret’s getting home from school. Her father was the Herr Direktor of the Artemis Theatre. He would take a couple of hours off midafternoon, before the box office opened for the evening performance, take tea with his wife and daughter in his apartment, return to the theatre and not be home again until hours after Méret had been put to bed.

“How can they let themselves be so deceived? How can Germans be so stupid? It couldn’t happen here. If he’d stayed in Austria we’d have seen through him. Imagine it—a corporal from Linz hijacking an entire country? It couldn’t happen here!”

Now he brought her the consequences of the Nazis seizing power. One year on, and some of those collared in the first roundups, in the wake of the burning of the Reichstag, were being set free. Mostly they were left-wing, intellectual, or both, and the Nazis either regarded a spell in Oranienburg as intellectual rehabilitation or they expected them to leave. Many did leave. Vienna, where most of Austria’s quarter of a million Jews lived, was swelling with an influx of German Jews, German leftwingers, and German intellectuals.

“Darling girl, if I mention the name Viktor Rosen do you know of whom I speak?”

Of course she did. Viktor Rosen might not be the most famous pianist in the German speaking world, but he was close to it.

“He is living in Vienna now. In Berggasse. Close to Professor Freud. He called in at the theatre today. I had the opportunity of a chat with him. He is taking on pupils.”

Imre paused to watch his daughter’s reaction.

She set down her teacup and with the gravitas that only a preadolescent can muster when talking to an exasperating adult, replied, “Papa, Herr Rosen is a pianist.”

“The cello is his second instrument. Just as the piano is yours.”

Now she could see what he was saying. She concealed her joy—it came naturally to her.

“And,” said her father, “he has agreed to take you on for both instruments.”

She wished she could hug him, she wished she could sing her joy. Her father scooped her up and saved her from expressions of love and gratitude that would have been clumsy and embarrassing. He hugged her and spun her around and set her back on the carpet in the middle of the room a little dizzy from the ride. He smiled his pleasure; her mother, gently tearful, wept hers. Méret would repay his joy. Of course she would. She would play for him. Music said it all. She’d never had much need of words. Music was her code.