Lying with the Enemy

But not on the quiet, idyllic island of Guernsey, the only British territory to be occupied by German troops in the Second World War. Here Nazi officers still party with local girls, love affairs blossom, and the amateur dramatic society continues to stage its theatricals, if with suspiciously jackbooted pirates in Peter Pan. Then the body of a young woman, her nose and mouth filled with cement, turns up, and the comedy of manners played out by the collaborators and their captors turns sour. Food becomes scarce, facades of civility crack, the skies over Guernsey darken, and the search for a killer unearths horrors shared by the islanders and the enemy alike in this novel that Antonia Fraser names "the most stimulating and also the most exciting I read this year. A novel of rewarding subtlety and insight into the best and worst of human nature" (The Times--London)

Amazon.com Review
In Lying with the Enemy, Tim Binding has written a novel that is part war story, part murder mystery, and wholly compelling. Set on Guernsey during the final years of World War II, the story traces the impact of German occupation in the British Channel Islands on both conquerors and conquered alike. Binding makes it clear that the Nazi presence on Guernsey was a fairly civilized affair from the get-go; aside from an abortive raid shortly after the Germans invaded in 1940, the British surrendered the Channel Islands to the enemy, leaving their residents to forge an uneasy accommodation with their new masters. By 1943, when Binding's novel begins, the Germans have been on Guernsey for three years and an inevitable degree of fraternization has become the norm. This is especially apparent in the complicated relationship between Major Lentsch, his island-born lover, Isobel van Dielen, and her former flame (and Guernsey's current chief constable) Ned Luscombe. When Isobel is murdered early on in the proceedings, it is up to Ned to solve the crime--a task that throws him into a reluctant liaison with his rival. As he and Lentsch join forces, their investigation leads them into the back-street world of twisted passions and unholy alliances among islanders and occupiers alike. Meanwhile, the professional association between a world-weary cop and a Nazi-hating German officer turns gradually into a fast though unlikely friendship. Lying with the Enemy is both fine historical fiction and a remarkably acute study of the troubling choices essentially good people make when trapped in morally ambiguous circumstances. --Sheila Bright