Interlopers

The Strangers Bureau, Book 1

De: James Philip

Narrado por: Madeline Clare

Interlopers - book 1 of the Strangers Bureau Series is a novella introducing my new series of supernatural mysteries - The Strangers Bureau - featuring veteran Sûreté detective Eleanor Gerard and set in the now tranquil but historically blood soaked landscape of Northern France.

Book 2 in The Strangers Bureau series - Pictures of Lily - is about the ghosts of the Western Front and the spirits of the ones they left behind.

In Interlopers we discover that not all is well within the mysterious, ultra secretive Security Committee for Interloper Affairs.

For nearly a century, SCIA's work has remained a dark secret within the underbelly of French Governments through war and peace. Nominally acting under the direction of the Ministry of the Interior, the Security Committee for Interloper Affairs - the best kept secret of the Fifth Republic - has become a bloated, corrupt monster, a rogue organ of state whose senior officers are more preoccupied with their own personal aggrandisement and the preservation of SCIA's power, than any meaningful notion of service to the French state.

No French government has ever admitted the existence of SCIA and yet in Paris key members of the embattled socialist administration - confronted with poll ratings in free fall and a deepening economic crisis - has belatedly recognized that the Security Committee for Interloper Affairs is a loudly ticking time bomb. SCIA was created to quarantine, to hide, to render invisible a reality that no French Government has ever dared to confront.

Now is the time of reckoning when sooner rather than later, that reality will become public knowledge.

And when that happens, so too, will the scandal of the Security Committee for Interloper Affairs.

Acting under presidential decree three men meet clandestinely in a villa at Compiegne to belatedly begin to contemplate the unthinkable.

©2014 James P. Coldham (P)2020 James P. Coldham

An intriguing opener.

Although this title is a little short, it has two things going for it: The second title in the series is longer, and the story potential that's left open is potentially vast. When taken in context with the narration, which is done as well as one could ask for - honestly, the characters actually seem to have real emotions and reactions to what's happening to them - it gives a sense that this could be happening. The characters and plot seem to develop easily and naturally, giving a sense of believability that I find lacking in some books of this genera.