Lying With the Enemy Author:Tim Binding In 1943, 145,000 Germans had been slaughtered in Stalingrad. The tide of the war was beginning to turn. But not on the quiet, idyllic island of Guernsey, the only British territory to be occupied by German troops in the Second World War. Here Nazi officers still party with local girls, love affairs blossom, and the amateur dramatic society cont... more »inues to stage its theatricals, if with suspiciously jackbooted pirates in Peter Pan. Then the body of a young woman, her nose and mouth filled with cement, turns up, and the comedy of manners played out by the collaborators and their captors turns sour. Food becomes scarce, facades of civility crack, the skies over Guernsey darken, and the search for a killer unearths horrors shared by the islanders and the enemy alike in this novel that Antonia Fraser names "the most stimulating and also the most exciting I read this year. A novel of rewarding subtlety and insight into the best and worst of human nature" (The Times--London)« less
This is a story on the German occupation of the Channel Islands during WWII. The Germans planned for the Islands to become a vacation destination and had therefore somewhat friendlier relations with the locals. Although undercurrents of the nastier side of the Nazis are woven throughout the book, like the mistreatment of the "foreigns" and the "hospital" they are building that is more like an abbatoir. All of this is the background to a disturbing murder mystery.