Peter Watson. Madeleine’s War. New York: Nan A. Talese: Doubleday, 2015. 384p. ISBN 978-0-385-53979-1. $26.95. Fiction
Spring 1944, Scotland. Col. Matt Hammond is in charge of training British agents to be parachuted into occupied France shortly before the Allied D-Day invasion. During weeks of intensive instruction, Matt falls in love with one of the female recruits, Canadian Madeleine Dirac. Invalided himself, he has already lost one lover to the war but reluctantly tasks Madeleine with a near suicidal mission. The Gestapo in Paris have broken several circuits of British agents, and she needs to determine if a double bluff has worked. Soon after the invasion, Madeleine disappears, and Matt himself is sent to Paris, his mission equally perilous. VERDICT Historian and novelist Watson (author of Gifts Of War and The Clouds Beneath the Sun, written under the pen name Mackenzie Ford) adheres as closely as possible to historical events while developing the romance between Matt and Madeleine. Unfortunately, this is “Matt’s War” rather than Madeleine’s, since the novel is narrated from his point of view, with too much exposition presented in wooden dialogue. For those who enjoy historical novels set in the context of D-Day.