PAPERBACKS

THE SACRED COMBE

Thomas Maloney (Scribe, £8.99)

After his wife leaves him, 25-year-old merchant banker Samuel Browne stumbles across a job advert that leads him to Combe Hall, a cold, decaying house in the remote countryside. His task, under the guidance of elderly owner Arnold Comberbache, is to go through every book in Combe Hall’s 18,000-strong library looking for a letter written by one of his ancestors in 1770. The old man wants it for his archive, and to fill in gaps in the family history. A Gothic pastiche set in the present day, and with somewhat mannered dialogue, the novel unfolds in a leisurely way, luxuriating in descriptions of the house and surrounding countryside as Samuel probes back through time, via notes scribbled in margins and letters tucked between pages, to uncover family secrets. Samuel himself is a hard protagonist to root for, but The Sacred Combe gets top marks for its dreamlike, timeless atmosphere and it leaves a note of ambiguity hanging in its wake.

DEFECTORS

Joseph Kanon (Simon & Schuster, £8.99)

It’s 1961, and Frank Weeks, the most notorious American defector to the USSR, announces plans to publish his memoirs. Weeks’ brother Simon is now an editor and is offered the chance to go to Moscow and prepare the manuscript for publication. Well aware that the book will be full of Soviet propaganda, he still can’t resist the opportunity to find out what drove his brother to turn traitor. But in a Moscow filled with defectors leading drab lives, Frank reveals that his true motive all along has been to defect back to the US, and he has a plan ready to roll. Frank is a persuasive guy, but can Simon risk being lied to and betrayed out of brotherly loyalty? Cold War spy novels are Kanon’s forté, and he negotiates Frank’s complicated plot with aplomb, drawing on his extensive knowledge of the USSR to create a convincing backdrop and ramping it up into a tense thriller in the closing stages.

THE KING WHO HAD TO GO

Adrian Phillips (Biteback, £12.99)

What is there still to tell about the abdication crisis of 1936? It’s been exhaustively covered, though not quite from this angle. Rooting through archives, classified documents and diaries, Adrian Phillips has pieced together an account of the affair from the perspective of the Establishment: Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, MI5 and a host of Whitehall mandarins. Amidst the phone-tapping, dodgy police reports, negotiations with newspaper barons and consultation with the Dominions, the most dramatic moment recorded here must be the frenzied rush to foil Edward VIII’s plan to flee to Zurich by air in the middle of a constitutional crisis. It’s a valuable opportunity to look past the façade and see the machinery of government working, Baldwin in particular calibrating his response to each turn of events as it happened. Phillips is pretty tough on all those concerned, but Edward’s unsuitability for kingship, borne out by later developments in Portugal and the Bahamas, is clear to see.