A secret meeting during the Berlin Olympics, and some weeks later the very same young lady is found dead.

He won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award for his second novel, Revenger, and a TV series of the John Shakespeare novels is currently in development.But the deeper Thomas Wilde delves, the more he wonders whether the murders are linked to the death of the girl with the silver syringe - and, just as worryingly, to the scandal surrounding King Edward VIII and his mistress Wallis Simpson. Wilde is a likable and engaging hero and his associate, the British intelligence operative Philip Eaton, a suitably intriguing and ambivalent character, entirely in keeping with the convoluted plot and setting. King Edward VIII's forbidden love for the divorcee Mrs Wallis Simpson arrives in the midst of this, playing an interesting and disturbing role.

Mix in an abdication crisis and unscrupulous powers and we have a top flight historical thriller on our hands. Taking the reader from the opening scene in Germany, where Nancy Hereward, a left-wing idealist and daughter of a Nazi sympathiser, is trying to help the Jewish scientist escape, through her subsequent death, Clements establishes his novel as a murder mystery on a grand scale, for then, the parents of Nancy’s friend Margot, who are also friends of fascist Germany, are brutally murdered.For further information about your statutory rights, contact your local authority Trading Standards department or consumer advice center (for example the Citizen's Advice Bureau if you are in the UK).