The Ashenby Incident (The Ashenby Trilogy Book 1)

In the first of D. M. Mitchell’s powerful trilogy, a ninety-five-year-old man makes his way into the main offices of The London Gazetteer, a popular newspaper, with an appointment to see Nicholas Harvey, the chief editor. The old man, Ronald Seaton, has a book with him – The Ashenby Incident – written by Nicholas Harvey a number of years ago. It concerns the mysterious bombing of the small East Coast Yorkshire village in 1944, an incident which wiped out most of the village’s inhabitants. But Harvey isn’t interested in what the old man has to say. At least, not until the pensioner reveals he has a bomb strapped to his chest and will detonate it if Harvey doesn’t listen.

The building is evacuated and Harvey is forced to listen to the old man, who reveals as a young soldier he was stationed in Ashenby in 1944, and what’s more personally witnessed a government cover-up of monstrous proportions. He tells of a plane crash – a plane carrying a strange and deadly cargo – and how, over two horror-filled days and nights, the results of that crash changed Ashenby and his world forever.

Chief Inspector Blake is summoned to the hostage-crisis in the Gazetteer building. But as the day unfolds the police officer begins to suspect everything is not what it seems as his own beliefs, caught up in the swift-moving events, are gradually changed, forcing him eventually to do the unthinkable.