It’s 1946 and war-torn London is recovering from an invasion, an occupation and the bloody struggle for liberation. 

But the fascist hydra is far from dead and a clandestine group of resurgent Nazis is plotting regime change in a spectacular event that will decimate the nation’s leaders and herald the establishment of the Fourth Reich. 

Standing in its way is one man: Chief Superintendent Brendan O’Connor, former resistance leader and the man considered both a national hero and an enemy of fascism. 

While the tell-tale signs are there, the existence of the fascist plot is confirmed by intelligence from an unwelcome source. The SS general O’Connor was forced to work for during the occupation, a man he hates obsessively, now offers crucial information. The former general is living in London under an assumed persona, having negotiated his immunity from prosecution for war crimes, and O’Connor is one of the few people who know his true identity. 

In desperation, O’Connor accepts the general’s help in tracking the fascist group and foiling its plot. But the general’s motives are ambiguous, the man himself utterly untrustworthy, his devotion to the Nazi Party and its ideology undiminished. 

Ironically, it is a series of brutal murders that finally allows O’Connor to infiltrate the fascist group. But there are powerful figures in the upper echelons of both the police and government who will stop at nothing to prevent him uncovering the plot and arresting its ringleaders. 

Threatened with a violent death, O’Connor is saved only by the timely intervention of his vagabond army — loyal former resisters who dwell in the shadows, on the very fringes of London society. The fascist group’s explosive coup is ultimately thwarted by an unlikely combination of a traumatised former soldier, a concussed police inspector and a mild-mannered civil servant. 

Having foiled the coup, O’Connor is despatched to find and destroy the group’s headquarters in British-occupied Germany where a deadly showdown is inevitable. Accompanying him, ostensibly as his cover, is his former SS boss whose motives remain questionable and his loyalty suspect. But they are effectively double-crossed by a rogue agency, ensnared in a clever plot that will see the former general secretly executed. 

The Irish policeman, whose bitterness over the occupation continues to fester and who yearns to bring the former SS general to justice, now faces an agonising decision over whether this man deserves to be saved. 

Murder and Masquerade is alternative history, a story set in the imagined landscape of a London that has emerged from German occupation. It portrays a society fractured by resentment and suspicion, and threatened by an enemy from within — an enemy that refuses to accept defeat. The one man with the sheer doggedness and determination to fight the forces of fascist tyranny is himself deeply traumatised and haunted by images of the past. 

This is the story of how that one man overcomes his trauma to wage a new war to protect a precious and fragile democracy.