LOOKING FORWARD TO 2025: SMOKE AND EMBERS By JOHN LAWTON
A new John Lawton novel is always a treat and in 2025 we are going to get the ninth book in his excellent series about Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, Smoke And Embers (Atlantic Monthly/Grove Press, 13 May 2025).
Lawton’s last two books have been about the cat burglar turned spy, Joe Holderness (Wilderness), and we have only had fleeting glimpses of Troy during that time. Now Lawton returns fully to Troy, and the wait has been worth it.
In typical Lawton disregard for the progress of the series through the years, Smoke And Embers is set back in 1950, not long after the events in A Lily In The Field and well before the occurrences of the most recent Troy novel, Friends and Traitors. The book finds Lawton returning to the years following the end of World War II in Britain and opens in 1950 with a seemingly inconsequential murder. However, things become more complicated when Chief Inspector Troy learns that his sergeant has been conducting an affair with the known mistress of an infamous London racketeer, Otto Ohnherz. Troy is immediately intrigued by the mysterious origins of Ohnherz’s second-in-command, Jay Fabian, who is a major contributor to all three British political parties and claims to have survived the concentration camps. Yet there is no proof supporting Fabian’s claims and the Intelligence agencies suspect that he is a Russian spy.
It is a good opening, and the book quickly becomes an intriguing mix of duplicity and reinvention in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.
I have been fortunate enough to get an early copy of Smoke And Embers and I am already enjoying it greatly. The pacing is leisurely so far, but Lawton smoothly adds on layers of intrigue and deception as he re-introduces the reader to a succession of familiar faces. With a twisting plotline, crackling dialogue and characteristic humor, Smoke and Embers is, as the publishers say, “an exciting new addition to John Lawton’s masterful canon”.
I will do a full review when I have finished, but in the interim add Smoke And Embers to your list of ‘must reads’ in 2025.
Smoke and Embers is released in the United Kingdom and the United States around 13 May 2025.