K is for Killing – Daniel Easterman
I can’t for the life of me remember which the first book store I got this book from, but I’m relatively certain it was Waterstone’s in Notting Hill Gate, and I’m very glad I did.
The story for K is set in 1940’s America, and is based around three main characters. British agent John Ridgeforth, Vice President David Stephenson, and his wife and Laura Stephenson.
During the Depression, America has voted in a fascist government. Charles Lindbergh is the hugely popular, but ailing President. His Vice President David Stephenson is the most powerful fascist in the country, and a thoroughly dangerous and evil man. As World War Two starts, America’s neutrality holds, but very thinly.
British intelligence can see that it won’t be long before President Lindbergh dies, and David Stephenson becomes President, making America join in the war, siding with Nazi Germany against Great Britain. Under the highest orders and greatest secrecy, Whitehall dispatch an agent to America to assassinate David Stephenson before he comes President.
Aided in secret by Stephenson’s wife Laura, John Ridgeforth becomes employed by David Stephenson as legal counsel to replace a former counsel who dies of a ‘freak accident’.
Concentration camps are set up all over the United States for blacks, gypsies, Jews, atheists and a slew of other groups of society. The Klu Klux Klan are shoved into a powerful position, given approval from the government and set up in many areas of public life. America becomes a prison for the ‘undesirables’, muchlike 1930’s Germany was for Jews and other minorities. Suspected enemies of the state are monitored by the dreaded Federal Bureau of Internal Security (FBIS) and its hardnose chief, J. Edgar Hoover. The Ku Klux Klan, whose members compose the core membership of the ruling AAA (Aryan American Alliance), rampages through the countryside, committing violence and murder with the full authority and assistance of the State.
Unbeknownst to Ridgeforth, Stephenson is already concocting a plan to assassinate Lindbergh. His co-conspirators, a concentration camp commandant named Jim Jackson, FBIS Chief Hoover, and a German diplomat named von Schillendorf, want Lindbergh eliminated before he discovers the secret alliance that has been made between German and American scientists for research on the atomic bomb. Stephenson has Lindbergh murdered, frames two Jewish prisoners and quickly is sworn in as President.
Stephenson invites Hitler to the US to witness the first test of the Nazi-Alliance atomic bomb in New Mexico. Delighted by the destructive force of the A-Bomb, Hitler is given even more to smile about when one of his US-based secret policemen provides him with proof that the President’s wife is a traitor, she’s been having an affair with a British agent, and Stephenson himself has been sexually abusing their daughter. Hitler confronts Stephenson with the evidence, radically shifting the balance-of-power between Nazi Germany and KKK Amerika.
This story is riveting and I absolutely loved it. This is another one that can be read over and over. Mostly whilst sitting on the toilet hahaha!
Buy ‘K’ by Daniel Easterman from Amazon
