Sabotage

When the dark clouds of war began to roll across Europe in 1939, Pamela Bradley-Browning expected to be conscripted into the British army. Instead, thanks to her wealthy father and his connections, and what he believed to be Pamela’s total inability to do anything except file her nails and party ’til dawn, she’s given safe but essential war work as an assistant intelligence analyst at MI5. That is until a flurry of sabotage activity and a shortage of agents has Pamela posing as a member of the Women’s Land Army with instructions to root out the bad guys.

Although determined to show her father she’s not the brainless idiot he thinks, Pamela makes the mistake of falling in love with Corporal Bruno Sabatini, one of the Italian prisoners of war working on the same farm. She knows fraternizing with the enemy is a crime. But she’s not too worried until she discovers Bruno’s father owns an arms factory in Italy, appears to be pro-German, and Bruno is MI5’s number one suspect as the saboteur. If Bruno is found guilty, she can add conspiring with the enemy to the charges against her.

While the Italian pow’s are the enemy and the obvious suspects, Pamela knows a saboteur needs motive as well as means, and she doesn’t believe the pow’s have either. It’s someone else, but who? Desperate to clear the name of the man she loves before the police decide to wring a confession out of him, she doesn’t know where to start looking--until the farmer’s wife, Maggie, decides to help, and Pamela learns about certain pre-war friendships and dangerous secrets that were successfully used as blackmail in the past.

Although this is something that happened five years ago and the blackmailer is now dead, Pamela has a feeling the potential for blackmail still exists. In fact, there’s an excellent chance someone else has discovered the secret and is using the knowledge for his or her own ends. To solve the mystery and save Bruno from false arrest, she’s in a race  against time to find the latest pieces of the puzzle and unmask the real villain.