The Seventh Room - Ishtar's Gate, #1

WW2 fiction, 2024
A heartbreaking and healing story of love, trust, honour, treason, resistance, and a deadly, killing anger, set in the simmering pressure cooker that was Colditz Castle in World War 2.

When Germany voted a dictator into power, resistance came too late

The SOE  - The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - is recruiting for spies and saboteurs to set Europe ablaze. Haunted by dreams of the Burning Times, Tomasin West signs up. She's a midwife and a nurse; a healer, but inside her a dangerous anger is clamoring. The Nazis have launched a latter-day witch-hunt across Europe, and now Tommie is a saboteur, so something is going to burn.
The Welsh-born son of a dead German war hero, Peter Brandt is an officer in the German army, just like his father before him – except that Peter is spying for Michael Hendry, a maverick British Intelligence chief. Billeted in the infamous allied officers' POW camp at Colditz Castle, Peter becomes involved with the ill-fated resistance, and finds himself captivated by their lost Germany. The complications pile up when he learns that the new prisoner, an odd little woman, is another of Hendry's agents, thrown into the castle as bait in a trap for the officers.
As the war boils around them, the stone-cold castle turns into a crucible. Prejudice and hate are burned away or tempered, and new forms emerge; enemy, friend, traitor… witch and witch-finder. But who gets to define 'traitor', and how do you define a witch? When those Tommie has come to love are threatened, she must define herself; is she really a healer, or… something else entirely?
Emotional, gripping, heartbreaking and healing, The Seventh Room will be loved by fans of The Nightingale, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, Code Name Sapphire and All the Light We Cannot See.

390 pages