Nest of the Monarch
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
In this “riveting” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) conclusion to the Dark Talents series, Kim Tavistock is undercover in Berlin as the wife of a British diplomat but when she uncovers a massive conspiracy that could change the course of the war, she’s the only one in a position to stop it.
November, 1936. Kim Tavistock is in Berlin for her first Continental mission for SIS, the British intelligence service. Her cover: a sham marriage to a handsome, ambitious British consul. Kim makes a diplomatic party circuit with him, hobnobbing with Nazi officials hoping for a spill that will unlock a secret operation called Monarch. Berlin is a glittering city celebrating Germany’s resurgence, but Nazi brutality darkens the lives of many. When Kim befriends Hannah Linz, a member of the Jewish resistance, she sets events in motion that will bring her into the center of a vast conspiracy.
Forging an alliance with Hannah and her partisans, Kim discovers the alarming purpose of Monarch: the creation of a company of enforcers with augmented Talents and strange appetites. Called the Progeny, they have begun to compel citizen obedience with physical and spiritual terror. Soon Kim is swept up in a race to stop the coming deployment of the Progeny into Europe. Aligned against her are forces she could never have foreseen, including the very intelligence service she loves; a Russian woman, the queen of all Talents, who fled Bolsheviks in 1917; and the ruthless SS officer whose dominance and rare charisma may lead to Kim’s downfall.
To stop Monarch and the subversion of Europe, Kim must do more than use her Talent, wits, and courage. She must step into the abyss of unbound power, even to the point of annihilation. Does the human race have limits? Kim does not want to know the answer. But it is coming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kenyon's riveting third Dark Talents novel (after At the Table of Wolves and Serpent in the Heather) takes 33-year-old psychic spy Kim Tavistock undercover into febrile and menacing Nazi-dominated 1936 Berlin, her first European mission as an agent of British intelligence service SIS. While the British government, concentrating on bond payments, apparently fears the Soviets more than the Nazis, Kim's father and handler Julian Tavistock hopes that her "spill" talent, which makes people want to tell her things, will provide information about Germany's suspected new secret weaponry. Kim, ever favoring the underdog, witnesses Nazi anti-Semitic atrocities and decides to help Hannah Linz, a fervent Jewish saboteur. Together they penetrate a Nazi scheme to infiltrate Europe with vampiric augmented psychics. Kenyon successfully builds Kim's insistence on defying authority on the foundations of her caring heart, her intuition, and her ethical judgment. Kim's dicey espionage mission thus presents a universal dilemma: the choice between following questionable authority or becoming a rogue moralist. A rich cast of diverse characters and near-catastrophic escapes amid searing prewar tensions keep the pages of this outstanding historical fantasy turning.