The DeValera Deception (Winston Churchill Thrillers)

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Pub Date 08 May 2018 | Archive Date 31 Aug 2018

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Description

In the summer of 1929 Weimar Germany still has a secret military agreement with the USSR to develop new weapons beyond the Ural Mountains. Ultimately, both want to dismember the newly revived independent Poland, but to distract Britain from helping the Poles, the new Irish Free State is placed at risk by conspirators and arms dealers intent on fomenting an IRA coup d'état.

Winston Churchill is about to travel to North America when the new Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald asks him to handle a secret assignment. The IRA intends to buy large quantities of arms in the United States and an SIS team will investigate. Churchill is to enlist American President Herbert Hoover to prevent the weapons from reaching Ireland. But Churchill has his own unofficial team gather evidence as well.

Bourke Cockran Jr., a law professor and former military intelligence agent, is the son of Churchill's old Irish American mentor. Mattie McGary, Churchill's goddaughter, works for William Randolph Hearst. Attracted to each other, their tempers often clash as Cockran and Mattie follow a trail from New York to Los Angeles through Canada to discover who is funding the IRA and where the arms are assembled.

But Mattie is also keeping secrets from Cockran, who has an agenda of revenge: to kill the leader of the IRA team who is responsible for the murder of his wife in the Irish Civil War. These plans interfere with foiling the arms shipment and an IRA plot to assassinate Churchill. And time is running out . . .

 

About the Authors

Michael McMenamin and Patrick McMenamin are the co-authors of the award winning 1930s era “Winston Churchill Thriller” series. The first four novels in the series—The DeValera Deception, The Parsifal Pursuit, The Gemini Agenda and The Berghof Betrayal—received a total of 14 literary awards. The Silver Mosaic is their fifth Winston Churchill Thriller and they are currently at work on their sixth, The Liebold Protocol. Both Michael and Patrick have travelled extensively in Europe, South America, Central America and Asia while Patrick has also travelled in the Middle East and Africa.

 

Michael is the author of the critically acclaimed Becoming Winston Churchill, The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor [Hardcover, Greenwood 2007; Paperback, Enigma 2009] and co-author of Milking the Public, Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby from LBJ to Jimmy Carter [Nelson Hall, 1980]. He is an editorial board member of Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the Churchill Centre and Museum in London and a contributing editor for the libertarian magazine Reason. His work has also appeared in The Churchills in Ireland, 1660-1965, Corrections and Controversies [Irish Academic Press, 2012] as well as two Reason anthologies, Free Minds & Free Markets, Twenty Five Years of Reason [Pacific Research Institute, 1993] and Choice, the Best of Reason [BenBella Books, 2004]. He was formerly a first amendment and media defense lawyer and a U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent.   

 

Patrick, the other half of the father-son writing team, is an award-winning journalist who has produced stories for ABC News, Fox News and HuffPost. He is a Phi Beta Kappa cum laude graduate of the University of Rochester with Departmental Honors in both 20th Century European history and Film Studies.

Don’t miss the next Winston Churchill Thriller: The Liebold Protocol

Visit the authors at:  www.winstonchurchillthrillers.com

https://www.facebook.com/WinstonChurchillThrillers

Keywords: Churchill, Hitler, Weimar Germany, Irish Free State, IRA, Poland, Anti-Semitism, Nazi

In the summer of 1929 Weimar Germany still has a secret military agreement with the USSR to develop new weapons beyond the Ural Mountains. Ultimately, both want to dismember the newly revived...


A Note From the Publisher

Keywords: Churchill, Hitler, Weimar Germany, Irish Free State, IRA, Poland, Anti-Semitism, Nazi

Keywords: Churchill, Hitler, Weimar Germany, Irish Free State, IRA, Poland, Anti-Semitism, Nazi


Available Editions

EDITION Ebook
ISBN 9781506906058
PRICE $6.99 (USD)

Average rating from 6 members


Featured Reviews

Book Review: The DeValera Deception (Winston Churchill Thrillers) by Michael McMenamin & Patrick McMenamin

Hard-nosed, unsanitized historical depiction of fictional events where no person or topic is held sacrosanct, revolving elliptically around Sir Winston Churchill with emphasis on his "despised" American heritage. Replete with uncompromising brutality - lots of gore, sex, rape, hatred; bigotry against Catholics, bias against Americans and disdain for the Irish by the British, In turn, Herbert Hoover, derisively portrayed as the "engineer" president, comes across as cold-hearted and insensitive toward the cause of an Ireland struggling for freedom.

Perhaps, during that time, all these may have been a version of reality after all.

Money, mistresses, estates and grandeur were king. Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" quote apparently came three quarters of a century too late. In the book, even the chambermaid was invested in stocks.

Gone the affable, double-chinned, rotund person famous for his speeches; enter an energized, materialistic version, working dollars for newspaper articles, though still ubiquitous, the cigars and the man's alcoholism. Churchill plays a bit role, albeit manipulative and critical to the story. Think "The Eagle Has Landed", except the setting is in America and the villains are Irish of the brutal, internecine type plus pre-Hitler Germans. Oberst Kurt Steiner, heroic paratrooper-leader, is replaced by Kurt von Sturm, aspiring Zeppelin pilot.

Eamon DeValera, "Long Fellow", natural born American of Basque-Irish heritage, for all the grandeur of the title of the book, appears only on a few pages, almost as an historical footnote, even less than his arch rival and Minister of Finance, Michael Collins, "Big Fellow".

The strength of the book is in the orchestration by the authors of events and the fog of fiction and reality into an ensemble attuned in harmony, with the main protagonists, Bourke Cockran Jr., a law professor and former spy, and Mattie McGary, fictional goddaughter of the legendary P.M., barreling through the plot with Churchill, William Randolph Hearst, Hoover, the "Apostles" and a cast of historically true figures, interacting in the background.

Beyond the aggrandizement of the title, creative speculation and political controversy, the book is an intriguing first-class thriller with those essential dollops of power and greed particularly of men in government, the global finance and military industrial complex, and, representing the media, in a class by himself, W. R. Hearst.

Review based on an advance reading copy presented by NetGalley and First Edition Design Publishing.

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"The DeValera Deception" eBook was published in 2018 (the original paper edition was published in 2010) and was written by Michael McMenamin and Patrick McMenamin (http://www.winstonchurchillthrillers.com). Mr. McMenamin has published seven novels and this is the first in their “Winston Churchill 1930s Thriller” series.

I categorize this novel as ‘R’ because it contains scenes of Violence and Mature Situations. The story is set across North America in 1929.

Winston Churchill is traveling across Canada and the US. The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, asks him to discretely approach President Herbert Hoover to get assistance in stopping the sale of arms to the IRA. While a team of SIS agents is dispatched to investigate, Churchill decides to rely on his own resources. He recruits his goddaughter, Mattie McGary, who is a reporter for the Hearst newspapers and Bourke Cockran a lawyer and son of one of Churchill's former mentors.

While Cockran develops a strong love interest in McGary, he also mistrusts her and Hearst. The two are able to discover quite a bit about the IRA plot, but they find themselves in dangerous situations time and again. Cockran is distracted by the presence in the US of the IRA agent responsible for the death of his first wife. He struggles to keep his focus on the arms deal instead of seeking revenge.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 9.5 hours I spent reading this 415 page period thriller. I liked the characters of Cockran and McGary, as well as the real historical figures that the authors have woven into the story. I like the cover art selected for the novel. I give this novel a 4.5 (rounded up to a 5) out of 5.

Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.

My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).

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A wonderful first book in a thrilling series involving Winston Churchill. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction, mysteries and the esteemed Prime Minister himself. 5/5

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

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