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Out of the Blackout
Robert Barnard
#UB4292
Paperback, 200 pages; 2006 (1984)
$14.95
 Members' Price: $12.71
Bas Bleu is proud to offer fourteen novels published by Felony & Mayhem, specialists in saving classic, plot-driven mysteries from extinction! Publisher Maggie Topkis has selected these titles especially for Bas Bleu's readers. She's written most of the reviews on these four pages. Look for her initials (MT) to see why she likes what she likes!
Robert Barnard is well known to mystery fans, but this title has been unavailable for many years. The real appeal here is the historical setting: the protagonist, Simon Thorn, was evacuated from London during the blitz, along with many other working-class children, but was never retrieved by his parents and was too young to give the authorities any real clues as to where he came from. He was raised by a foster family in the countryside, but it is now the early 1960s, and Simon, newly moved to London for a job, decides to try to track down his birth family. The investigation takes him back to the London of the late 1930s, which is where the book's real richness lies—the period is incredibly well-evoked, and the milieu, of working-class Fascist sympathizers, is fascinating.
(MT)
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