Quentin Cope

The Carlisle Trilogy Quentin Cope

The Carlisle Trilogy. It's France, 1919. The First World War is over. Eve Charbonneau is growing from a spoilt only child and middle-class girl of Jewish descent into an eventual heroine in the French resistance - but first falling pregnant along her youthful precocious way to a dashing wealthy French aristocrat, Thierry Marquis de Vergy-Laval, someone who commits suicide when confronted with the situation unacceptable to his high social station. Predictably, her illegitimate boy-child is taken from Eve by her shamed parents and passed secretly into the care of a religious order of French monks and nuns near Nice. Her fall continues as she drifts homeless and despairing into life in a Paris bordello, constantly longing for her lost son, leading inevitably - as her fortunes improve in a most unlikely way - to her lifetime search for him with fateful consequences for both mother and son as the scourge of Nazism engulfs Europe. France is plunged into war once again and events that take place in the forests surrounding Rodez during April 1944 will give cause for decades of vengeance, murder and retribution. The body of Sophia Le Roux will hang at the edge of the pine forest on the outskirts of the town in full view of all passers-by. Everyone locally knows who put it there. For the Le Roux family, the situation remains unfinished and a vow of vengeance is born! With Eve discovering an American secret agent she has betrayed to the sadistic Nazi interrogator, Herr Hauptmann Steiger, is in fact her long lost son she is heartbroken and selflessly takes what ends up being a fatal bullet so that he may live. And so the fascinating saga of the Carlisle family begins. Following unexpected twists and turns, tense scenes of confrontation and a sinuous, relentless theme of retribution making one single thread linking all the main characters forced to travel America and Europe in search of a personal peace. But could an unexpected scenario, played out within the famous Barrakka Gardens on the Mediterranean island of Malta, bring a surprising end to it all?