What if?

Saving the King

Sometimes you come across a great image in a book, one that you know will stay with you. It is 1940 and the Germans have invaded Britain and won. In the back of a captured German staff car, Queen Elizabeth (who we later came to know as the Queen Mother) is firing a revolver back at pursuing Germans. She is resplendent with a pink eye-patch over her right eye, an eye she lost in a raid on Buckingham Palace, a raid in which her husband, the King, died.

Now, if a book can come up with an image like that, don't you want to read it?

The book is somewhat episodic and Oldham jumps from action to action almost as if he wrote a much longer book and has edited out chunks of it to present us with what we have in hand. Thus we start with John Stafford, a 17-year-old Canadian "doing" Europe, getting employed to spy on the Nazis and, in the process, preventing an assassination of the Crown Prince of Romania. He also stops some Italian submarine saboteurs. Later, when war breaks out, he enrols and later becomes a Commando. He rescues the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, about to be crowned King and Queen by the Nazis, from the Tower of London, together with the last Yeoman and 4 Ravens. Amazon.ca

What do you think life would be like today if WWI or WWII had a different outcome?