Coming Soon.
A Historical Mystery and Espionage Thriller Set at Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park, February 1943.
A young woman is found drowned in the lake at dawn. Marion Graves, cryptanalyst, twenty-four years old, possessed of a lifelong, documented terror of water she never willingly approached. The night-shift guards confirm she never left Hut 3. The sign-in log shows she entered at twenty-two fifteen and never signed out. The lake is a quarter of a mile away.
The mathematics are impossible.
Hazel Ward is Bletchley Park’s internal security officer: methodical, watchful, and occupying a rank that carries just enough authority to make powerful men uncomfortable and not quite enough to make them cooperate. She has solved personnel problems, managed security breaches, and written more vetting reports than she can count. She has never investigated a murder. She is not entirely certain, yet, that this is one.
But Marion was not merely a drowning victim. In the final weeks of her life she had quietly discovered something in the intercept traffic: a pattern of falsified signals, phantom intelligence seeded into the system and dispatched to the Admiralty, distorting the information on which lives at sea depended. Thirty-seven signals. The same handling code on every one. Marion had noticed what no one else had seen, because leaving things alone was not in her nature.
That is what killed her.
As Hazel moves through the codebreaking station’s labyrinth of compartments and clearances, she finds herself working against time on two fronts. The first: an investigation that the institution itself would prefer to close quietly, in a way that serves the Ultra programme above all else. The second: the arrival of Captain Alistair Fenn of MI5, authoritative and entirely charming, whose attentions to the foreigner in Hut 6 strike Hazel as rather too convenient for a service that would rather find a German spy than a British traitor.
Her only outside ally is Detective Inspector Chadwick of Buckinghamshire Constabulary, a careful and unhurried man who has been asking inconvenient questions of his own, and whose post-mortem findings do not fit the word accident nearly as tidily as the official account requires.
The truth, when Hazel finally pieces it together, will be both more human and more terrible than espionage. The killer is not an enemy of Britain. The killer is a man who made one defensible choice, and then another, and then could not stop.
The Phantom Signal is a historical mystery and espionage thriller set at the height of Britain’s most consequential Second World War intelligence operation. Perfect for readers of wartime fiction and Bletchley Park novels, including Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, Robert Harris’s Enigma, and Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity.