Wolf's Hook - Tapa blanda

This book belongs, in the words of Henning Mankell, 'in the shadowy world where history and imagination merge'...It was a sunny Saturday lunchtime in June 1944. Most of the inhabitants of a sleepy village situated in the ‘Free Zone’ of war-ravaged France were sitting down to a leisurely meal. Without warning, an attachment of Das Reich soldiers (the elite force of the Nazi’s Waffen-SS division) arrived. Hours later, 642 defenceless people had been massacred; their homes were smouldering ruins. From these embers emerged true, life-affirming stories of survival as individuals defied machine-guns, snipers, explosives and burning buildings to escape the clutches of the deadly wolf’s hook. Aimed at 12+ readers, Wolf’s Hook is a factionalised account of the Das Reich attack on an innocent village. It recaptures the essence of what happened that day, using four first-person narrative strands: a waiter, a young boy, an SS soldier and a grandmother. Through their eyes we see the terrifying day unravel. (!!Author's warning: for 12+; this is the same book and text as Murder to Music but with a different cover!!)

Rodney Marshall is married with two children, Jessica and Tomas. He divides his time between rural Suffolk (where he teaches English and creative writing at OBH) and South West France. He has written articles for The Sunday Times, property magazines and fanzines. He is the author of Blurred Boundaries, a study of Ian Rankin's Rebus series. Wolf's Hook is his first work of fiction. His father, from whom he gained a love of books and stories, is a well-known television and film writer, most famous for his work on The Avengers, The Sweeney and Lovejoy.