Killing Times — David Fraser

Veronica Gaisford. Most men desired her, many loved her, some mistrusted her, but none was indifferent. Amid the violence and bitterness of the First World War and the years that followed, she bound together the lives of three very different men. She was exceptional - beautiful, passionate, and passionately loyal to her native Ireland. She could have been a traitor or a saint. Francis Carr, a Foreign Office civil servant, met Veronica newly-widowed in Berlin and half fell in love with her, doubting her apparent innocence. His cousin John Marvell loved her boundlessly, blindly, won her and lost her, and was prepared to perjure himself for her safety. Her relationship with Gerhardt Brendthase, a young German officer with the Imperial General Staff in Berlin, was more ambiguous - was it an emotional or a professional attachment? Against a brilliantly graphic background of war and its aftermath, David Fraser unfolds the private lives of his characters to form a many-sided drama. It was a turbulent and bloody age, when lives were lost and futures shattered. An age where both heroism and treachery could flourish...