About the Book
In 1949, eight years after the “Peace with Honor” was negotiated
between Great Britain and Nazi Germany by the Farthing Set, England has
completed its slide into fascist dicatorship. Then a bomb explodes in a
London suburb.
The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of
Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a
conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch King-and- Country
patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Britain's Prime Minister
and his new ally, Adolf Hitler.
Against a background of increasing domestic espionage and the
suppression of Jews and homosexuals, an ad-hoc band of idealists and
conservatives blackmail the one person they need to complete their
plot, an actress who lives for her art and holds the key to the
Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theatre to the
ha'pennies that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the
investigation swirl around one another, spinning beyond anyone's
control.
In this brilliant companion to Farthing, Welsh-born World Fantasy Award
winner Jo Walton continues her alternate history of an England that
could have been, with a novel that is both an homage of the classic
detective novels of the thirties and forties, and an allegory of the
world we live in today.
