Showing results by author "James Philip" in All Categories

Conventional wisdom is that if the Crown Colonies of the Commonwealth of New England ever unite in common purpose; then the Empire might fall. That this might happen at the very moment that century-old post-war settlement of the Treaty of Paris is threatening to fall apart, had been the unimaginable nightmare of generations of European monarchs, politicians, diplomats and generals The unthinkable is happening. Mexican troops are advancing through the South Western borderlands of New England; nothing can stop them. At sea, the supposedly invincible Royal Navy has been driven from the ...

Welcome to the Timeline 10/27/62 prequel series COUNTDOWN TO WAR starting in October 1961 and concluding when the world goes mad during the last weekend in October 1962. A HARD RAIN is the twelfth and penultimate of thirteen books in this series which will be released at monthly intervals between 27th October 2023 and 27th October 2024. It is September 1962. A train of events which has been slowly, menacingly coalescing ever since October 1961 is beginning to play out. The end game is nigh. OPERATION ANADYR is morphing from a reckless whim in Nikita Khrushchev’s fevered imagination to a ...

In the terrible "big picture" of the bombing war, Bielefeld suffered less than many places in Germany. Bielefeld was not - quite - wrecked from end to end; for Hannah Martin’s grandmother, that was no consolation because everything with which she had grown up was destroyed, and her father, the painter, was lost in the fire.

This was where it had started; and ought to have ended. Cuba... Initially, it was estimated that over 90 percent of the population of the main island - over six million men, women, and children - had died on the day of the war.

August 1940 - Chief Inspector Guy Winter has been Fleet Street's favorite detective for over a decade. Dubbed the "Mystery Man" by his friends and enemies alike, for all his fame he cuts a lonely figure at Scotland Yard, where every newspaper story is fresh grist to an already tired mill. Laid low by personal tragedy, there are many who suspect that the great detective's career is over.

The House on Haight Street is a novella featuring Miranda Sullivan and Joe Calleja, culled from material originally included in the body of Warsaw Concerto (Book 13 of the Timeline 10/27/62 series). It did not make the "final cut" for two reasons: Firstly, I thought it was one sub-strand too many and therefore interrupted the flow of the rest of the narrative; and secondly, the book was getting very long even by my standards!

For nearly a century, SCIA's work has remained a dark secret within the underbelly of French Governments through war and peace. Nominally acting under the direction of the Ministry of the Interior, the Security Committee for Interloper Affairs - the best kept secret of the Fifth Republic - has become a bloated, corrupt monster, a rogue organ of state whose senior officers are more preoccupied with their own personal aggrandisement and the preservation of SCIA's power, than any meaningful notion of service to the French state.

Pictures of Lily is the first full-length book of The Strangers Bureau, a series of supernatural mysteries, featuring veteran Sûreté detective Eleanor Gerard and set in the now tranquil but historically blood-soaked landscape of Northern France. Pictures of Lily picks up where Interlopers, book one of the Strangers Bureau Series, ends. It is about the ghosts of the Western Front and the spirits of the ones they left behind.

La Argentina covers the period of the Argentine invasion of the British South Atlantic Dependencies (The Falkland Islands-Las Islas Malvinas, South Georgia and the British Antarctic Territories) in the spring of 1964.

It is November 1963 - 13 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis went horribly wrong. In this timeline the swinging sixties are not going to happen and the survivors, far from counting their blessings are beginning to wonder exactly what sort of world they have created.

Two years after the war to end all wars, the American people are confronting the reality of the altered world. As the US’ armed forces—weakened from the peace dividend—begin again to flex its slowly recovering offensive muscle, a second war rages in the Korean peninsula, and American and British forces circle each other warily from the North Atlantic to the Straits of Hormuz as the wounded Soviet bear broods behind its borders.

The 1976 Germania Olympiad, blighted by terrorism proved to be anything but the great propaganda triumph designed to accompany Reinhard Heydrich’s supposedly epoch-defining peace treaty with the United States. However, far from drawing a line under the crimes of the past, the Europa Reich is riven with generational and economic problems and never has the concept of a grandiose Roman-style Triumph to celebrate the disaster of the recent games and a token exculpation of the atrocities committed by the ‘Great’, wartime generation, been more divisive across a Reich attempting to re-write ...

Christy was the most famous American painter of the Jazz Age, a time when an elite brotherhood of New York artists dominated the publishing world. Christy had eclipsed all of them with his "Christy Girl", an idealized woman who redefined beauty, influenced fashion, and inspired generations of women. In Romantic Illusions, Christy once again comes to life through the eyes of Nancy Palmer. Christy, his wife and former model, as she recounts her first Christmas with Howard and his family at his Ohio mansion, the Barracks, in 1912.

In The Plains of Waterloo, eight months have passed since the bloodbath at Harald Villas at the end of A Ransom for Two Roses. Frankie has been slowly piecing her life back together and coming to terms with her changed self. When she visits a notorious child killer in prison at Waddon Hall Maximum Security Unit in Dorset, she believes she is testing how far she has come since that terrible winter night.

The piano was a 1912 Bechstein Model A Grand presented in a walnut, patterned case that was originally situated in the drawing room of the Schloss Marienhalle for some years, before it was transported to the what was at the time, the dining room of the Lake House. There it had resided in all its tonal splendour for some ten years before I set eyes upon it, little knowing that it would play such a pivotal part in my life. I look at it today and the memories flood back. It becomes harder to put them in their proper order, chronologies become muddled with the passing of the years, confused by ...

Welcome to the Timeline 10/27/62 prequel series COUNTDOWN TO WAR starting in October 1961 and concluding when the world goes mad during the last weekend in October 1962. January 1962 and the new year dawns with the West and the Soviet Union locked in rhetorical sabre-rattling, with both side’s leaders deaf to – or perhaps, more accurately – in denial about the other’s problems. From sunny California to windswept Lincolnshire the shadow of war is ever-present, the leader of the free world exhorts his people to build bomb shelters, Nikita Khrushchev periodically threatens to rain ...

Welcome to the Timeline 10/27/62 prequel series COUNTDOWN TO WAR starting in October 1961 and concluding when the world goes mad during the last weekend in October 1962. DOOMSDAY BLUES is the fifth of thirteen books in this series which will be released at monthly intervals between 27th October 2023 and 27th October 2024. It is February 1962. John Glenn, the first American has finally contrived to orbit the Earth. In Laurel Canyon and Beverley Hills one journey pauses and another ends. In England Peter Christopher guiltily reflects on his prospective marriage to a woman he does not love and...

Gathered on the Beach is the thirteenth and final instalment of the Countdown to War prequel series of the Timeline 10/27/62 series. The outcome of the Cuban Missiles Crisis hung in the balance right up to the moment, it did not. In the desperate hours as the sides groped for a way out of the hole they had dug for themselves, a single misstep might have been disastrous and to this day most people do not realise that the Cold War very nearly went HOT, as in thermonuclear 'hot'. In the Timeline 10/27/62 saga the Cuban Missile Crisis goes disastrously wrong and the swinging sixties never ...

It is the late summer of 1966. This is a FOOTBALL book about the World Cup of 1966 set in the altered timeline of 10/27/62 in which the swinging sixties never happened because the Russians and the Americans blew up the world when the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong on Saturday 27th October 1962. When the representatives of sixty-nine national governing bodies of Association Football gathered in Rome a few days ahead of the start of the Football Tournament of the 1960 Summer Olympic Games – the normal governance and regulatory minutiae apart – there was only one real matter which ...

“Just for the record; this is insane!” By then I ought to have known better than to speak truth to a member of the SS but actually, given that I was sitting at the controls of a prototype aircraft which had crashed on its maiden flight – I should know, I was flying it at the time - and had presumably, been in the hangar under repair ever since, I had every right to be pessimistic about my odds of surviving the forthcoming take-off so basically, there was not a lot the man in the right hand seat could do to frighten me. Or rather, if one was being pedantic; frighten me any more than I ...