Two words that to a student of modern history mean a great deal, to the rest of us very little. Something to do with Germany after the first world war, a descent into decadence, followed by the rise of the Nazi party and the ascendance of Adolf Hitler. The birthing of the evil that would lead to the Holocaust and World War Two.I’ve never been a great fan of historical fiction, so I don’t quite know what drew me to a curious book called The Killing of Emma Gross. I’d only just dipped a toe in the whole ebook thing myself, self-publishing a couple of my own novels after they’d failed to find a publisher over a number of years. Allan Guthrie, a writer I very much admire (and not just because of his Maine Coon cats), had just set up the ebook publishing house Blasted Heath, along with Kyle MacRae. Keen to help this enterprise, I picked up some of their early titles and loaded them onto my phone. I even meant to read them. One of them was by this fellow called Damien Seaman. It didn’t look all that promising – see my earlier comment about historical fiction – but an unexpected wait for a train, with no phone signal to fritter the time away on social media, left me with nothing better to do than read The Killing of Emma Gross.
