Sherlock Holmes and the Rosetta Stone Mystery is the first of Linda Stratmann‘s novels following the consulting detective in the making. Tom Williams, author of the Napoleonic era-set James Burke adventures and the darker John Williamson books, finds it “rather wonderful”. The world is full of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Most of them, to be honest, […]
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair by Tom Williams
It’s 1809, and when a mission running agents into Napoleon’s France goes horribly wrong, it’s up to Burke to save the day. With the French secret police on his trail, can he stay alive long enough to free British spies from imprisonment in the centre of Paris? And how does the Empress Josephine fit into […]
Cawnpore by Tom Williams
In 1857 John Williamson, a gay man from a humble background, does not fit in amongst the British rulers of India. When mutiny erupts he finds his loyalties torn between the Europeans he despises and the Indians he loves. How can he be true to himself and still survive the massacre that will follow the […]
The White Rajah by Tom Williams
When James Brooke arrives in Borneo on the schooner ‘Royalist’, he plans to make a quick profit trading with the natives. Instead he finds himself taking sides in a civil war. And when his side wins, he ends up the ruler of his own country. As the first White Rajah of Sarawak, Brooke is determined […]
Review: The White Rajah by Tom Williams
Author Deborah Swift embarks on an adventure in the South China Seas to review Tom Williams’s reissued novel, The White Rajah, and finds much to enjoy. I’d never heard of James Brooke before reading Tom Williams’s excellent biographical novel, so I have been educated as well as entertained. Set at the beginning of the 19th […]
Burke in Ireland by Tom Williams
1793 and James Burke is under cover in Ireland, spying on Irish Nationalists. His objective: to discover any plots to conspire with the French to bring down English rule in Dublin. Dublin is full of plotters. Finding them is easy. Staying alive is not as straightforward. A tale of spying, love and death against the […]
Why I wrote about Irish history
Tom Williams’s Burke series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars takes the spy James Burke across continents as he pursues adventure, love – and the French. But when it came to sending his character, a historical figure born in Ireland, back to his native land, Tom found himself asking: why write about Irish history? […]
Review: The Lifeline by Deborah Swift
Tom Williams reviews The Lifeline by Deborah Swift, an adventure story with a dash of romance set in German-occupied Norway during a lesser-known episode of resistance to Nazi rule. Deborah Swift’s latest continues the Second World War theme of her latest books. We’re in German-occupied Norway in 1942. We are thrown into the action practically […]