The Nostradamus traitor - John Gardner (Herbie Kruger #1)

It began in London in 1978 when a woman dressed in a severe grey suit approached a Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London and asked about her husband. He had been, she said, a spy for the Nazis and had been caught and executed in the Tower. When telling the story long afterwards, the Warder would say that he went cold—because many people had gone to their deaths in the Tower, including Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Monmouth, and Essex—but not Frau Fenderman’s husband, Claus.

Herbie Kruger got the job of sorting it out. Big Herbie looked as thick as lumpy porridge and he had a slow and decidedly stupid smile which had been the undoing of many people. In fact, he was clever and methodical and he never gave up. From that first encounter at the Tower, he began to put the pieces together. It all harked back to the War and had started off as one of those odd operations run by the people who finally formed the nucleus of the Psychological Warfare Executive. But the operation had gone wrong and Herbie now had to find out how and why. All he knew was that the operation had involved pushing phoney occult predictions into the Nazi mind, using the uncannily accurate prophecies of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century seer. And the more Herbie dug, the bigger and more dangerous the web became, for more than one of the participants in the Nostradamus operation had something lethal to hide.