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** spoiler alert ** I loved the story, was carried along by it and finally finished reading it in the middle of the night.

I thought the whole alternate history concept was excellent, and I was drawn into the whole world very well. The politics were convincing. The bad guys were too.

But the central issue that drove the whole plot was, IMO, flawed. I didn't understand at all why the Americans wanted Frank. Yes, he knew his brother's secret. But they had his brother, and they had their own scientists. All they really needed was for the danger posed by Frank's knowledge to be neutralised.

Also after all the attention during the novel to Frank not wanting to tell anyone - the scene where he tells David the secret are completely implausible. And also really unnecessary - in fact I think it would work better if we didn't ever know the secret. We had an inkling anyway. But leaving it mysterious wouldn't draw so much attention to the enormous mcguffin shaped plot hole.

And I don't know who it was in that key scene at the end, but it certainly wasn't Churchill. The hard decisions we know he took in the war do not lead me me to believe he would be the kind of resistance leader who would spare the sensitivies of one man, compared to the potential benefit to the resistance. Black dog or no black dog...he would still have made that hard decision.

But it was a good read. I rather enjoyed the slow build up of tension in the beginning part of the book - I know that's probably an unusual personal taste. And I didn't mind the exposition - hard to imagine being able to write a book that depends so much on history and uimagine history without it. The second half though, that's a real pageturner.

An excellent read, but flawed.