This stylish cold war thriller brings impeccable (perfect, flawless) period detail to a tale of deception and derring-doTightrope is effectively a sequel to Mawer’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. So it’s probably worth a rapid/fast recap,for those struggling to keep up with the considerable avalanche of books that tend to feature a beautiful woman on the cover in a trenchcoat, beret and red lipstick, or sporting a 1940s up-execute. There’s a lot to explain – both about Mawer’s books,and about the whole phenomenon of second-world-war fiction featuring young female protagonists, often written by late-middle-aged men who presumably grew up on a diet of Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley.
Let’s start with The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, and daring Special Operations Executive officer Marian Sutro being dropped by parachute into south-west France. Marian’s job is to make contact with nuclear physicist Clément Pelletier,an old family friend, and to attend smuggle him out of the country. There are – but of course – romantic complications. Tightrope takes up where Girl left off: Marian has now returned to England. She marries a dashing RAF officer and a life of domestic bliss beckons. But she is soon drawn back into a dismal world of deception and double-crossing, and this time desperately trying to protect her brother Ned – who just happens to be a homosexual nuclear physicist,naturally – from the cold war attentions of both the Russians and the Brits.
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Source: theguardian.com