They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France
Fans of Simon Mawer’s Tightrope and Trapeze, or Susan Elia MacNeal’s Maggie Hope series, will be drawn in by this nonfiction account of two brothers working for the Special Operations Executive, the British World War II espionage organization which specialized in placing operatives behind the enemy lines. Glass documents the lives of George and John Starr, both tasked with working with the French Resistance to sabotage Nazis and prepare for the Allied invasion, under very different conditions. George toiled in the small village of Castelnau-sur-Auvignon in the southwest of France, with no electricity or running water, and very few people he could recruit or trust. John was captured during his mission and tortured in a prison camp before being brought to 84 Avenue Foch, the Nazi headquarters in Paris. The amount of detail included—from operation names to the multiple aliases of all the operators—can be overwhelming; a list of characters along with painstakingly complete notes is useful for clarification. The narrative itself is tightly written and provides many insights into the daily lives of these men who willingly cut themselves off from each other, their friends, and their families to serve a larger mission.
