Island of Ghosts
This is a story about the Nazi’s own Devil’s Island, when Adolf Hitler occupied Britain's Channel Islands during World War II. On one island, Alderney, they established four slave labour camps, building fortifications as part of an 'Atlantic Wall' to defend occupied France.
The story is set both in 1943 and in this century, starting when two teenage slave labourers escape, determined to get away before they die of overwork and semi-starvation, even though all previous would-be escapers have been shot. Taking advantage of one of the island’s frequent foggy day, they abscond from a working party and make a break for it.
At first they are in luck. A shipwreck in the harbour diverts the authorities’ attention. But do they get away in the end?
Sixty years later one boy, a Pole, now very old and suffering memory loss, returns to find out what happened to his friend. On the boat across he meets an artist, Anna, visiting her estranged husband for a possible reconciliation. Gradually he draws her scarily into his own reliving of his violent wartime experience, like being saved from an anti-personnel mine by a rabbit setting it off.
When out sketching on foggy days, Anna discovers that she is drawing scenes of the island as it was in 1943 and of the boys’ escape. She learns more from the diary of the German Commandant’s mistress, now in the island archives. It both tells her about the escapers being hunted and how the mistress, like Anna herself, is trapped in an empty relationship, until she becomes an embarrassment and is sent away to a brothel.
Following these leads, Anna continues her quest until, inexorably, she finds herself witnessing the boys’ final escape in a small boat, when they are machine gunned by guards on the shore.
The mistress tries to rescue one of the boys, who dies in her arms, while the other survives as the dinghy drifts into the fog, with Anna herself powerless to intervene. The story ends with her leaving the island and a revelatory twist in the plot on the very last page.
Richard Cox has had eleven other novels published. SAM 7 about an Arab terrorist shooting down an airliner over London, was a bestseller in London and New York. The New Yorker called The Botticelli Madonna, (in UK Auction ), about the art business, 'choice entertainment'. Richard's books are listed on Amazon.
Genre: Historical
This is a story about the Nazi’s own Devil’s Island, when Adolf Hitler occupied Britain's Channel Islands during World War II. On one island, Alderney, they established four slave labour camps, building fortifications as part of an 'Atlantic Wall' to defend occupied France.
The story is set both in 1943 and in this century, starting when two teenage slave labourers escape, determined to get away before they die of overwork and semi-starvation, even though all previous would-be escapers have been shot. Taking advantage of one of the island’s frequent foggy day, they abscond from a working party and make a break for it.
At first they are in luck. A shipwreck in the harbour diverts the authorities’ attention. But do they get away in the end?
Sixty years later one boy, a Pole, now very old and suffering memory loss, returns to find out what happened to his friend. On the boat across he meets an artist, Anna, visiting her estranged husband for a possible reconciliation. Gradually he draws her scarily into his own reliving of his violent wartime experience, like being saved from an anti-personnel mine by a rabbit setting it off.
When out sketching on foggy days, Anna discovers that she is drawing scenes of the island as it was in 1943 and of the boys’ escape. She learns more from the diary of the German Commandant’s mistress, now in the island archives. It both tells her about the escapers being hunted and how the mistress, like Anna herself, is trapped in an empty relationship, until she becomes an embarrassment and is sent away to a brothel.
Following these leads, Anna continues her quest until, inexorably, she finds herself witnessing the boys’ final escape in a small boat, when they are machine gunned by guards on the shore.
The mistress tries to rescue one of the boys, who dies in her arms, while the other survives as the dinghy drifts into the fog, with Anna herself powerless to intervene. The story ends with her leaving the island and a revelatory twist in the plot on the very last page.
Richard Cox has had eleven other novels published. SAM 7 about an Arab terrorist shooting down an airliner over London, was a bestseller in London and New York. The New Yorker called The Botticelli Madonna, (in UK Auction ), about the art business, 'choice entertainment'. Richard's books are listed on Amazon.
Genre: Historical
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