The Great Liars: They knew he knew. Too bad for him. - Tapa blanda

It seems like easy duty. Lieutenant Lowell Brady is ordered to London as a secret liaison to Winston Churchill, who is working his way back to power as the threat from Germany grows. All this dashing officer has to do is pass on messages, a made-to-order job for a handsome rake with no greater ambition than finding a rich woman to marry. The Navy would have kicked out the scoundrel long before if it weren't for the influence of his stepfather, the powerful Senator from Georgia, who got Brady a billet as a minor White House aide. “You’d be nothing without me,” he says. Brady, no fool whatever else his faults, is the first to agree. It's a good thing his mother adores him and the senator is firmly under her thumb. Roosevelt and Churchill see war coming, and struggle to get their countries ready, no easy job when America wants nothing to do with Europe and its troubles. When the balloon goes up, Brady expects to be behind a desk far from danger. But the ailing Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s friend and closest adviser, takes a shine to him. When war breaks out, Brady goes with him to London for a top-secret pow-wow with Churchill during the Blitz, and then on to Moscow and the Kremlin for talks with the sinister Stalin. It is dangerous that close to power, as Brady further finds out when he becomes part of the small circle that knows Roosevelt intends to get America into the war before it is too late, even if it means sacrificing the Pacific Fleet. Against his selfish nature -- swinish wouldn't be too strong -- Brady goes out of channel to warn of the coming attack. Caught red-handed, his punishment is being ordered to join MacArthur in the Philippines. When he survives Corregidor, he is dispatched to Guadalcanal. They want shut him up for good, but Brady is as slippery as an eel. Years after the war, Smithsonian researcher Harriet Gallatin comes across his story while interviewing veterans at an old soldiers' home. Skeptical at first, she becomes a believer when the FBI and then the CIA take a menacing interest in her research. If the truth gets out, reputations will be destroyed and political careers ended. One thing is clear. The two of them have to disappear fast.

Jerry Jay Carroll was an award-winning San Francisco journalist and J.S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. The author of four novels, he lives with his poet wife far from the madding crowd in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas.