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by John Nettles.
Softcover (5.1×7.8 inches). 337 pages. 2024 reprint of 2013 book.
The author is better known as a Midsomer Murders TV detective, but when shooting Bergerac in the Channel Islands, he became fascinated with the islands’ history, especially the period from 1940 to 1945 when the Germans occupied it all.
Information about how the British inhabitants coped with escalating food shortages, regulations, and regimentation are not in chronological order or even grouped by island. Instead, individuals’ stories roll out all over the place, meandering from one person to another.
The production value of this Seeker Publishing reprint needed an editor to look over it. I found only a couple typos: Nazi Bulge Commander was “Piper” (p128) but should be Peiper and “time if took” (p138) should be time it took. However, two pages are reduced in size with huge margins (p155 and p276) and several pages (p261-262, p265, p268, and p298) suffer from text with only half the opacity of text — think of it as light gray text on white. Sloppy, even for a print on demand book.
So, nice storytelling about a bit of generally overlooked history and sloppy production values.
Enjoyed it.
— Reviewed by Russ Lockwood
