The opening three novels of The Addlestone Chronicles, together — the place to begin.

Britain, the 1930s. As fascism takes hold across Europe, James Harcourt-Heath and Louise de la Béré are recruited out of Cambridge into British intelligence and sent into the gathering dark. What follows is a story about how ordinary societies talk themselves into extraordinary cruelty — and about the few who see it coming and refuse to look away.

That question runs through all three books, in a different key each time.

Book 1 — Addlestone. James and Louise, undergraduates and secret recruits, train under the shadow of Hitler's rise, until the danger surfaces at home: a Nazi cell operating on English soil, and a scheme darker than anything their training prepared them for.

Book 2 — Lebensborn. Married now, and seasoned, the couple moves through a Europe staging its unity for the world at the 1936 Berlin Olympics while concealing what lies beneath it: Lebensborn, the eugenics programme built to manufacture a "master race."

Book 3 — Magdalene. In their most personal mission, James and Louise face cruelty on two fronts at once — Nazi designs on Ireland, and the abuses of the Magdalene Laundries, a home-grown horror that needed no foreign ideology to sustain it, and that endured to the end of the twentieth century.

The series draws a deliberate line between the demagogues of the 1930s and the politics of our own moment. Readers of Ken Follett, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst will feel at home here: espionage grounded in real history, carried by character, and unafraid of the moral questions underneath.