A War of Flowers by Jane Thynne

I am a big fan of the wartime adventures of Anglo-German actress and British spy Clara Vine’s first two outings in Black Roses and The Winter Garden, so I was delighted to get stuck into the third volume of Jane Thynne’s series to see what happened next to Clara. In the first book, Clara had become a model for the Deutsches Modeamt (the Reich fashion bureau) and through that ended up as a confidante of Magda Goebbels and the other Nazi wives. In the second volume she got mixed up in a murder at Himmler’s Bride School for those marrying SS officers and later met the Mitfords and the Duke & Duchess of Windsor.

Where next for Clara, as we are nearing the formal declaration of war between Britain and Germany in 1939? Well, her British handlers have a new mission for her…

She thought of the task they were asking of her now. Getting close to Eva Braun, and in the space of a month? How was she possibly going to manage that? She didn’t even know what Eva Braun looked like. Emmy Goering had once said she looker like the film star Lilian Harvey but stupider, but that wasn’t much to go on. And even if Clara was to meet the girl and manage to talk to her, what were the chances that she would be willing to confide private details about Hitler’s state of mind? Clara would need to employ all her persuasive skills. She had become well versed in asking ingenuous questions under the guise of female curiosity – the paranoid, isolated existences of most Nazi wives meant they tended to open up gratefully to an apparently sympathetic listener – so all she could hope was that Hitler’s girlfriend felt the same.

Before that though, nearing the end of her stay while filming in Paris, Clara has to visit one of Coco Chanel’s soirées, to collect some perfume for Magda Goebbels. It is there that she meets Max Brandt, a cultural attaché at the German Embassy. He will become important later.

Back in Berlin, she delivers the perfume to Magda who is very depressed – her husband, a prolific philanderer wanted to move his current mistress in.

‘Anyway, the ménage à trois was intolerable. I couldn’t stop crying – I even thought of killing myself and the children. I did, honestly. When we accompanied the Führer to Bayreuth in July, I sobbed all the way through Tristan und Isolde.’

Clara will soon meet Eva, who turns out to be girlish, even naive, and a real chatterbox given the opportunity.

‘He’s very stubborn when it comes to taking any interest in my hobbies. Like perfume, for example. … he never comes shopping with me now and you can’t get French perfumes either. But it doesn’t matter because I’ve started making my own.’

I won’t tell any more about the plot except to say that Clara will eventually get to visit Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof near Berchtesgarden, under pressured circumstances – but luckily Adolf isn’t there. He has yet to make a proper appearance in Clara’s life.  Indeed, I rather hope he remains afar in Clara’s next adventures, for yes, there is to be a fourth Clara Vine novel. Yippee!

As before, Jane Thynne has brought us a wonderful picture of the life of prominent women under the Nazi regime. It was really rather enjoyable to encounter the Nazi wives again. In a side-plot, we find out more about some of the Third Reich’s programmes too through which they tried to control people – in this case the disappearance of a young woman from a KdF (Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy) cruise ship; cruises being a reward for being a good Nazi.  The research is impeccable and the novel is full of fascinating detail.

Combined with adventure, spying, glamour and inevitable romance, we have another thrilling story which romps along and definitely left me wanting more.  I asked Jane a whole load of questions about A War of Flowers and the other Clara Vine novels, but you’ll have to wait for the next edition of Shiny New Books on April 7th.  (9/10)

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Source: Publisher – thank you.

A War of Flowers by Jane Thynne. Pub Nov 2014 by Simon and Schuster. Paperback Mar 2015, 416 pages.