Black Roses is coming soon!
I’m so pleased that Simon & Schuster are to publish my next novel Black Roses. It is set in Berlin in 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power, and tells the story behind Hitler’s decision to establish a Reich Fashion Bureau to be run by the wives of the Nazi leaders. My heroine, Clara Vine, is an Anglo-German actress who comes into contact with the wives and gains their trust while spying on them for British Intelligence. In the process she discovers a dramatic secret at the heart of the Nazi regime which threatens her life, and the lives of those she loves.
I’ve always been fascinated by the lives of women in the Third Reich, which have so often been over-shadowed by military and political preoccupations. Women found themselves stripped of political power, moored in the home, oppressed by a regime which wanted to control everything about their lives down to the clothes they wore and the number of children they had. It’s a theme I’m going to explore further in the background to the next two novels in the Clara Vine trilogy.