Ha’penny
On sale
24th December 2013
Price: £8.99
In Ha’penny, England has completed its slide into fascist dictatorship. The last hopes of democracy seem extinguished. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb.
The brilliant but compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists – of staunch King-and-Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen – to murder the Prime Minister and his ally, Adolf Hitler.
Against a background of domestic espionage and suppression, a band of idealists blackmails an actress who holds the key to the Fuhrer’s death. From the ha’penny seats in the theatre to the ha’pennys that cover dead men’s eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl inexorably to a stunning conclusion.
The brilliant but compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists – of staunch King-and-Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen – to murder the Prime Minister and his ally, Adolf Hitler.
Against a background of domestic espionage and suppression, a band of idealists blackmails an actress who holds the key to the Fuhrer’s death. From the ha’penny seats in the theatre to the ha’pennys that cover dead men’s eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl inexorably to a stunning conclusion.
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Reviews
[Farthing and Ha’penny] are compulsively readable for their characters and plots. But it’s [Walton's] observations about power that make them hard to put down.
Walton’s use of a common genre template—this time the race-against-time thriller—allows her to develop the eerily contemporary underpinnings of her alternate history…. Gives us much to think about regarding her world and our own.
Stellar… Horrifying and all-too-possible.
A literary Guernica—a top-notch thriller set in a terrified Britain that is all too willing to trade freedom for security, and which gets neither.
Haunting...Like meticulously nested Matroyshka dolls, both Farthing and Ha'Penny reveal complex arguments layered in their elegantly structured narratives.
Masterful work…. This is political suspense at its best and brightest
