A War of Flowers by Jane Thynne

review by Maryom


It's August 1938 and Europe is preparing for war while still hoping it can somehow be avoided. Clara Vine, half-British, half-German actress, and part-time British spy, is in Paris filming her latest movie for the German Ufa studios. Mixing with the beautiful and powerful at Coco Chanel's salon, she encounters two very persuasive men;  Max Brandt, a German cultural attache to whom she feels almost irresistibly attracted, and Guy Hamilton, from British intelligence, who'd like her to be-friend Hitler's girlfriend Eva Braun and pass on any inside information she can pick up. Clara's no stranger to mixing among the wives of the Nazi elite but Eva Braun is kept very much out of sight as she's deemed bad for Hitler's public image. How is Clara is even meet her, let alone strike up a friendship?
Meanwhile, Clara's godson Erich holidaying on a luxury Nazi cruise ship, believes one of his fellow passengers has disappeared - the only real option being that she fell overboard. Despite assurances from the captain that nothing untoward has occurred, Erich won't let the matter drop and asks Clara for help.


The third of the Clara Vine series is set at the time of Germany's annexation of Austria, the War of Flowers of the title, when Europe was on the brink of war but some politicians still believed that Hitler's aims would soon be achieved and a certain level of stability return. Any information about his intentions would be valuable, and who should know his plans better than Eva Braun? Clara is again thrown into danger as her knack of listening in a way that makes others pour out their hearts proves so very useful. I actually found I felt rather sorry for Eva, forced to live an almost isolated life hidden away from the world, with no friends allowed past the guards, and only her dogs for company.

The story has a lot of threads weaving round each other, and sometimes they're a little difficult to keep straight, or one is dropped for a while as the others progress, but everything sorts itself nicely in the end. The whole book is filled with suspense with Clara constantly aware that she could be being followed at any point in time, and never being quite sure who she can trust; is the rather dashing Max Brandt merely interested in her romantically or does he have other more sinister plans? The tension cranks up an extra notch when Clara is taken to visit Hitler's mountain retreat Berghof. The views are wonderful but the atmosphere chilly and threatening.

I'm really liking this series with its slant on history, and spying, from a female perspective. I'm just hoping now that it won't end when WW2 actually starts..

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars

Publisher - Simon & Schuster

Genre - thriller, historical fiction

If you haven't read the earlier Clara Vine novels, check them out here - Black Roses, The Winter Garden

The Winter Garden by Jane Thynne

review by Maryom

Four years have passed since the events of Black Roses, and Clara Vine is now an established actress at Berlin's Ufa studios about to star in a film with flying ace Ernst Udet, though like so many of the films produced there, this will be nothing more than thinly veiled piece of propaganda. Berlin has changed too in four years and the Nazi party are now firmly in control, welcoming and wooing foreign visitors like Edward, Duke of Windsor, and his wife Wallis Simpson, Charles Lindberg and two of the Mitford sisters - Unity, and Diana.  Clara still continues her dangerous balancing act passing gossip onto Joseph Goebbels while informing the British Embassy of insider information about the Nazis and their plans.
At one of the Nazis 'bride schools', young women are being trained in the domestic virtues that will be expected of them as wives of SS officers, but one of them holds a dark secret that someone is willing to kill for. Anna Hansen, ex-dancer and artists' model, seemed an unlikely choice of SS bride-to-be but the authorities seem curiously uninterested in her death and quick to cover it up. Clara, who knew Anna slightly, and her American journalist friend Mary Harker decide there's more to this than meets the eye - and decide to investigate...
Meanwhile through Udet, Clara makes friends with Ralph Sommers, a British aeronautical businessman and seemingly Nazi sympathizer, and Arno Strauss, a pilot in the technical division of the Luftwaffe conducting tests on new planes and aerial reconnaissance - areas that would surely be of interest to the British government. Through them and Mary Harker, Clara also learns of the German part in the Spanish Civil War, particularly the bombing atrocity at Guernica which points the direction that another European war might take.

The Winter Garden is a cleverly plotted thriller set against the very real backdrop of late 1930s Berlin; a world of glamour and luxury on the one hand, and squalor and food shortages on the other. A lot of the characters are of course real people and I love how Jane Thynne has brought them all to life - Goebbels with his double standards, gossipy Emmy Goering, Unity Mitford with her schoolgirl-like crush on Hitler, and her sister Diana, wife of Oswald Moseley, leader of Britain's 'blackshirts' and Nazi sympathiser.
It's a story full of tension and intrigue, in a world where it's hard to recognise friends from enemies. Clara is more confident in her role of spy now - she's been warned that the Gestapo are watching her movements, but this isn't going to put her off. They aren't the only people following her though - at one point, she has three people tailing her - all with different priorities! I often wondered how long she could go before she tripped up and revealed her secrets to the wrong person.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars

Publisher - Simon & Schuster

Genre - thriller, historical fiction

Black Roses by Jane Thynne

review by Maryom

Berlin, 1933. Warning bells ring across Europe as Hitler comes to power. Clara Vine, an attractive young Anglo-German actress, arrives in Berlin to find work at the famous Ufa studios. Through a chance meeting, she is unwillingly drawn into a circle of Nazi wives, among them Magda Goebbels, Anneliese von Ribbentrop and Goering's girlfriend Emmy Sonnemann. As part of his plan to create a new pure German race, Hitler wants to make sweeping changes to the lives of women, starting with the formation of a Reich Fashion Bureau, instructing women on what to wear and how to behave. Clara is invited to model the dowdy, unflattering clothes. Then she meets Leo Quinn who is working for British intelligence and who sees in Clara the perfect recruit to spy on her new elite friends, using her acting skills to win their confidence. But when Magda Goebbels reveals to Clara a dramatic secret and entrusts her with an extraordinary mission, Clara feels threatened, compromised, desperately caught between her duty towards - and growing affection for - Leo, and the impossibly dangerous task Magda has forced upon her.

I stumbled across this book after reading Magda, Meike Ziervogel's penetrating look at the wife of Joseph Goebbels. While that book dwells on the end of Magda's career, Black Roses captures her at the point when the Nazi leaders are newly come to power.
Although basically a spy thriller with a certain amount of romance thrown in, Thynne takes the reader behind the scenes of Nazi Germany in an unusual way - from a woman's angle. As an outsider, Clara makes friends in both the Nazi hierarchy and among those those they oppress. The book begins with the dramatic death of Clara's closest German friend, Helga, a fellow actress with Jewish friends who was too outspoken for the new regime. Her determination to avenge Helga's death is what drags Clara into using her privileged access to spy on Magda Goebbels, despite the danger involved. this insider's view gives the reader a look behind the scenes at the world of the wives and mistresses of the Nazi leadership; at their jealousies, snubs and constant jostling for power. And here's one of those contradictions with which Nazi Germany seemed riddled - these women dress in designer clothes imported from France or Italy, have perfectly made-up faces and beautifully coiffed hair; a far cry from Hitler's ideal of dirndl skirted, wholesome peasant women. Although I knew from school history lessons that Hitler had a belief that women belonged in the home, I had no idea how far he took his ideas - restricting university access and the kind of jobs open to women, forcing married women to abandon their careers and become housewives, even trying to govern the clothes they wore!

Don't think though that Black Roses is a dull fact-filled book. It gives a remarkable insight into Germany in the early 1930s but as a setting for a thrilling page-turning read. Living her double life Clara is constantly on edge, aware that the slightest wrong move could spell disaster for her and Leo - after all this is 1930s Germany and the overnight disappearance of friends or family is becoming commonplace. No one quite knows what the next day may bring...

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Simon & Schuster

Genre - thriller, historical fiction