Although I’ve never worked in a school as rural as the one described here, it seems unlikely that a sixth-grade boy is the star of the middle school football team. He is ambitious and clearly has the capabilities to do extremely well in his life by getting into a Cross school.

With his latest book, Double Cross, Ben Macintyre tells the astonishing true story of a bizarre group of misfit spies who played a critical role in the success of D-Day. Mathilde Carré was highly intelligent, overwrought, and, at the moment she met Czerniawski, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.Popov was a law student, while Jebsen was taking an economics degree, the better to manage the family firm. With total air, naval and code-breaking superiority by the summer of 1944, the allies had effectively sealed Britain off. I just wish I had more time to connect to the characters, to feel more for them so that when the plot climaxed, I would connect to how it affected everybody around Tobey, himself included. Employing a wry wit and a keen eye for detail, he delivers an ultimately winning tale fraught with European intrigue and subtle wartime heroics.

The theatricality of the moment was compounded by Czerniawski’s announcement that he had already selected a code name for his new accomplice: she would be “La Chatte,” the She-Cat, because “you walk so quietly, in your soft shoes, like a cat. She knows about terrible mistakes, and violence and family feuds, and the fierce divide between Noughts and Crosses. In the UK, it does seem like every couple of weeks there is a news report of a young life being taken because they turned to a life of crime and perhaps like Tobey they were sucked into it because of its perceived glamour or the fact it seems like the only way to make money and the only way out for them and it is quite sad to think this novel was published almost 15 years ago and today the same thing is still happening. If this type of reader were to read, Double Cross, I can predict that they will think this book drags on forever.would have been more than enough to see off some parachuted Nazi unfortunate who has been wasting months memorising Cockney slang, cricket scores and conversational gambits about the British monarchy. The outcome of the second world war was decided by many millions of people first making and then handling industrial equipment to kill one another on an inconceivably terrible scale.

If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added. One night, she stood on a high bridge, about to kill herself, but then changed her mind: “Instead of throwing myself into the Garonne, I would fling myself into the war. This unit was in reality “a wangle by Canaris to keep a number of young men out of the clutches of compulsory service. They went on a bender through Belgrade’s nightspots, having enlisted “two girls from the chorus of one of the clubs.It is a tribute to Macintyre's skill that the reader is haggard with anxiety as D-Day approaches – as, at any moment, one of these people could betray the great Anglo-American crusade.