DEATH SQUAD LONDON

Gerson's second foray into anti-Semitism and Hitler-era politics pits former Berlin police inspector Ernst Lohmann (Death's Head Berlin), now relocated in London, against English National Socialist Party sympathizers. When a fellow refuge asks Lohmann to investigate the death of Maurice Kovel's daughter Beth, a reporter; the former policeman attends the inquest, questions its finding (how could Beth have drowned herself by jumping off a pier when the tide was out?), then starts digging into her past. Among his discoveries: Beth was working on a story with information supplied by the Deputy Assistant Director of the Treasury (now on the run); a racist preacher is planning on assassinating Kovel during Oswald Moseley's East End protest march; and there is a major government cover-up of an ill-advised scheme which had the King channeling a quarter of a billion pounds out of the U.K. and into Hitler's coffers. Aided by a socialite, Lohmann interviews the King, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill (among others) and uncovers the financial machinations leading to Beth's death, under orders of a top New Scotland Yard man. Grim portrayal of anti-Semitism in England in the Thirties, a sad lovelorn King class demarcations, and xenophobia--all wrapped around a sharp murder investigation. The honest, durable Lohmann makes a fine hero.