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Closed Circle

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The year is 1931. The new and luxurious transatlantic liner Empress of Britain is on her eastward passage. Among the first-class passengers on board are two English confidence tricksters, making a discreet exit from a little awkwardness they have left behind them in the United States. A chance meting on deck brings them a tempting new target in the shape of Miss Charnwood and her niece, the beautiful Diana, only child of the immensely wealthy Fabian Charnwood.
It's a trick they've pulled before, with some success. Charm the daughter into an engagement to marry, then get the father to buy you off. So confident are they of success, in fact, that they make a pact: whichever of them wins Diana Charnwood's love will share his fortune with the other. Who would imagine that these smooth operators would let their hearts rule their heads? Or that violent death would find its way into their neat little scheme? Or that they would stumble into something much darker and deeper than either had suspected?
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary, in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914 is a classic tipping point of history, the moment when the power blocs of Europe started moving towards the catastrophic confrontation we know as the First World War.
The First World War is often portrayed by historians as inevitable, but that’s just hindsight at work. Opposing power blocs aren’t bound to clash. The long, uneasy balance of the Cold War tells us that. Inevitability only arose in 1914 when Franz Ferdinand’s death led to one unacceptable ultimatum after another being fired off by the European powers. From the moment the assassin’s bullet hit the archduke, it became a predictable – a foreseeable – disaster.
The question naturally arises: was the assassination itself foreseeable? The answer has to be yes. The threat from Bosnian nationalists, fomented by Serbia, was well-known. There’d been locked-tight security for the Emperor’s visit to Sarajevo in 1910, with troops lining the streets to prevent attempts on his life during his motorcade and all foreigners and known dissidents expelled from the city. None of those precautions was taken when the archduke came to town in 1914. Security was so lax it was almost as if someone was being invited to assassinate him. And they duly did.
Another question naturally arises: was the assassination not merely foreseeable but foreseen and orchestrated? Historians don’t know. The evidence isn’t there to say one way or another. But we can speculate; we can imagine; we can wonder. That’s the glory of novels. Who’d have wanted to spark off a world war? Who and, more importantly, why?
To seek an answer, I invite you to step aboard the Empress of Britain, perhaps the grandest of all the grand liners of the twentieth century, as she sails from Quebec, bound for Southampton, on 19th July 1931. We’re in the company of a pair of English chancers, Guy Horton and Max Wingate, friends since schooldays, determined to ensure their wartime service in Macedonia was the last time they did anything that wasn’t strictly calculated to be to their personal advantage. They’re about to take a step that takes them, almost before they know it, into the depths of a vast and far-reaching conspiracy.
And we’re going with them. Back to Sarajevo. And beyond.
'Goddard unwinds his plots like a conjurer'
Guardian
'A spendidly old-fashioned affair, full of thuggery and skulduggery, cross and doublecross, plot and counter-plot'
Independent
'A masterful performance from one of Britain's finest thriller writers'
Time Out