Interlopers — James Philip

Acting under Presidential decree three men meet clandestinely in a villa at Compiegne to belatedly begin to contemplate the unthinkable. What if ghosts really exist? Not as spectres, not as whispers in the night but as real people who simply find themselves out of their time and place like fallen angels. And what if our leaders have always known about the ‘interlopers' in our midst? Interlopers â€" Book 1 of the Strangers Bureau Series is a novella introducing my new series of supernatural mysteries - The Strangers Bureau â€" which features veteran Sûreté detective Eleanor Gerard. In Interlopers we discover that not all is well within the mysterious, ultra secretive Security Committee for Interloper Affairs. For seven decades SCIA's work has remained a dark secret within the underbelly of French Governments throughout war and peace. The best kept secret of the Fifth Republic has become a bloated, corrupt monster, a rogue organ of state whose senior officers are more preoccupied with personal aggrandisement and the preservation of SCIA's power, than any meaningful notion of service to the French state. SCIA was created to quarantine, to hide, to render invisible a reality that no French Government has ever dared to confront. Now is the time of reckoning when sooner rather than later, that reality will become public knowledge. And when that happens, so too, will the scandal of the Security Committee for Interloper Affairs. But things are moving too fast; the situation is not one of too many cooks wanting to put their fingers in the cake mix but of too many powerful men who ought to know better putting their hands into a meat grinder. Book 2 in The Strangers Bureau series - Pictures of Lily - is about the ghosts of the Western Front and the spirits of the ones they left behind and is available for purchase on Kindle.