John Lawton's debut novel--first published by Viking in 1995, and now
being reissued by Grove Press--is a stunning, war-time thriller that
cements his place among the greatest crime writers of our era. The first
of the Inspector Troy novels, Black Out singularly captures the
realities of wartime London, weaving them into a riveting drama that
encapsulates the uncertainty of Europe at the dawn of the postwar era.
London, 1944. While the Luftwaffe makes its final assault on the already
battered British capital, Londoners rush through the streets, seeking
underground shelter in the midst of the city's black out. When the panic
subsides, other things begin to surface along with London's war-worn
citizens. A severed arm is discovered by a group of children playing at
an East End bomb site, and when Scotland Yard's Dective Sergeant
Frederick Troy arrives at the scene, it becomes apparent that the
dismembered body is not the work of a V-1 rocket. After Troy manages to
link the severed arm to the disappearance of a refugee scientist form
Nazi Germany, America's newest intelligence agency, the OSS, decides to
get involved. The son of a titled Russian émigré, Troy is forced to
leave the London he knows and enter a corrupt world of bloody
consequences, stateless refugees, and mysterious women as he unearths a
chain of secrets leading straight to the Allied high command.
