The Master and the Messenger

"The Master and the Messenger" is a thriller novel by Kenneth McKay.

Plot introduction

In the depths of a Bavarian winter, while a US army camp sits breathlessly still amongst a thick landscape of trees on the first day of a new year, a high ranking officer, in full military dress, makes a life-changing decision which causes a furore back home. It is in the days when Germany still had a West and an East, and when intrigue and treachery were all around. An early morning snowy drive takes the man away from base on that celebratory day to a waiting border post while the men and women he chose to leave behind are left for dead.

In London a schoolgirl's life is soon to change as the American's defection intrudes into her father's world. The German incident, it is thought, is an opportunity for his office and its secret work to become involved in preparing a strategy to return the wayward US officer home. The first three months of the year see the girl's family slowly crumble as her father is taken up and away with US pressure mounting for the return of their soldier. By early spring the soldier has disappeared and is considered lost, and the girl's father is missing, presumed dead.

The international news story of that time eventually fades and what has been broken by those events, in the US and London, remains broken for a long time. The schoolgirl completes school and then loses herself, unable to accept her father's mysterious disappearance and unable to accept her place in the world without him. An ocean away in a northern state the high ranking soldier's family is equally broken, the family name hated and the children desperate. The officer's son, a schoolboy at the time of his father's actions, suffered most. A damning period of prison time brings some notoriety and, unexpectedly, a letter from England from which an airmail friendship is kindled. Two misplaced lives, it is thought, with a shared history, some common ground. If the young prisoner does not have a plan, the young English girl does. Some way, somehow, the schoolgirl needs to search, to find..... to show off her dad.

The story weaves between the events ot the two periods: in Europe and the USA, where the authorities are desperate to prevent any re-opening of an old political news story, which once gripped the country and changed many lives. Now a hunt is on again; the men, long missing, have left their children exposed, and now hunted down.

External links

* [http://www.themasterandthemessenger.com/ Kenneth McKay's "The Master and the Messenger" - official site]