His historical novels include the Nick Revill series, set in Elizabethan London, a Victorian sequence, and a series of Chaucer mysteries, now in in e-books.
Imagine this: in the mid-1970s a brash, loud-mouthed New York businessman meets and marries a Czech model and sportswoman. She sets up her own beauty business, even as her husband’s own multiple affairs dip and rise, sometimes coming close to bankruptcy. They divorce after producing a daughter but stay on friendly terms. Then, years later, the brash New Yorker decides to launch a bid for the US presidency. Everyone says he hasn’t got a chance but ...
We know how the story of Donald and Ivana ends. The anonymous author of The Kingfisher Secret creates a parallel world in which Anthony Craig - car manufacturer rather than in real estate but still brash, etc. - meets and marries Elena Klimentova, beautiful, Cezch and sporty. The twist is that, through a combination of bribes and threats to her family, she has already been pressured into working for the KGB, one of a flock of ‘swallows’ destined to link up with men who might one day go on to occupy powerful positions in the west. Even after the divorce Elena continues to work with ‘Anthony Craig’ and when he decides to go for the presidency it seems as though the KGB’s dreams have come true, in particular those of the sinister Aleksandr Mironov, the president of the Russian Federation.
Into this intrigue stumbles Grace Elliott, a middle-aged journalist on a Montreal tabloid. One of her commissions is to help Elena ghost a weekly advice column. When she goes beyond her brief and starts to dig into Elena’s background, she also begins to uncover holes in her life story. How did she get out of Czechoslovakia? What happened to her first husband? Why are there such suspicious gaps in the record?
Grace’s quest takes her to Prague and then to Strasbourg, Miami, Montreal and New York, all the time pursued by a small cast of hoods and secret policemen. Help apparently comes from an English university lecturer, who’s also researching in Prague.
There are chases by car and on foot, sinister texts and threats and beatings-up. Grace’s beloved cat is drowned in the bath. For all the would-be explosive quality of the subject matter and despite the odd good moment it’s all a bit underwhelming.
The last Anonymous novel to make a big splash was Primary Colors which came out more than twenty years ago and which seemingly lifted the lid on Bill Clinton’s first election campaign and the scandals that threatened it. I don’t think The Kingfisher Secret will have anything like the same impact. For one thing it’s not especially exciting. And for another it’s hard to imagine anything about the Trump presidency which actually outdoes what hits the headlines every day.
