Author Bio
Kathryn Gauci was born in Leicestershire, England, and studied textile design at Loughborough College of Art and later at Kidderminster College of Art and Design where she specialised in carpet design and technology. After graduating, Kathryn spent a year in Vienna, Austria before moving to Greece where she worked as a carpet designer in Athens for six years. She now lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Website: https://www.kathryngauci.com/
Book Blurb
From USA TODAY Bestselling Author, Kathryn Gauci, comes an unforgettable story of love, hope and betrayal, and of the power of human endurance during history’s darkest days.
Inspired by true events, The Secret of the Grand Hôtel du Lac is a gripping and emotional portrait of wartime France... a true-page-turner.
"Dripping with suspense on every page"
— JJ Toner
“Sometime during the early hours of the morning, he awoke again, this time with a start. He was sure he heard a noise outside. It sounded like a twig snapping. Under normal circumstances it would have meant nothing, but in the silence of the forest every sound was magnified. There it was again. This time it was closer and his instinct told him it wasn’t the wolves. He reached for his gun and quietly looked out through the window. The moon was on the wane, wrapped in the soft gauze of snowfall and it wasn’t easy to see. Maybe it was a fox, or even a deer. Then he heard it again, right outside the door. He cocked his gun, pressed his body flat against the wall next to the door, and waited. The room was in total darkness and his senses were heightened. After a few minutes, he heard the soft click of the door latch.”
February 1944. Preparations for the D-Day invasion are well advanced. When contact with Belvedere, one of the Resistance networks in the Jura region of Eastern France, is lost, Elizabeth Maxwell, is sent back to the region to find the head of the network, her husband Guy Maxwell.
It soon becomes clear that the network has been betrayed. An RAF airdrop of supplies was ambushed by the Gestapo, and many members of the Resistance have been killed.
Surrounded on all sides by the brutal Gestapo and the French Milice, and under constant danger of betrayal, Elizabeth must unmask the traitor in their midst, find her husband, and help him to rebuild Belvedere in time for SOE operations in support of D-Day.
Editorial Review
“The beauty of the French countryside belied what the French were going through. Amid the tranquillity was an acute sense of fear. Every word, every gesture, had to be made with care. The freedom of France she’d known as a young girl growing up in Burgundy seemed a lifetime away.”
In the midst of World War II, British SOE agent Elizabeth Maxwell receives a new mission. All communication between Belvedere, one of the Resistance networks in the Jura region of Eastern France, and the high command in Britain is lost. The silence is deafening and Elizabeth’s heart is breaking since the head of the unit, Guy Maxwell, is her husband – their secret marriage known to only a few. Now, she must find the courage and fortitude to dive back into the action, find her husband, as well as the answers behind the sudden silence.
One by one, Elizabeth reconnects with former friends and colleagues, other members of the Resistance, and one by one the clues behind the betrayal of the unit come to the forefront. She must trust no one, while using her excellent espionage skills and detecting work to sniff out the location of her husband, all the while fearing the worst has happened. And she must do all of this while under the watchful eye of suspicious Gestapo officers and the Milice Française, the political paramilitary organization fighting against the French Resistance and siding with Hitler.
When she learns of the details of the failed RAF airdrop that scattered the Belvedere agents, killing many of them, and the disappearance of her husband and another beautiful agent named Amelie, her fears increase as more clues unfold leading her to a mysterious and luxurious hotel tucked near a lake close to the Swiss borderlands. Her fears are well-founded as the brutality and pressure mounts each and every day as more and more citizens are interrogated, deported, or killed. And yet, she pushes on, each step bringing her closer to the truth. And each new sunrise brings the hope of an Allied invasion just on the horizon, if she can just hold on and do what she can to band together this broken network.
The hotel holds the key to her missing husband, which ultimately leads her trekking across the dangerous and secret passages to the safety of Switzerland... where she finds her husband, Guy, and some unexpected news – he is injured, but the love they feel for each other surpasses any thought of the scars of war, and together they determine to return to France to discover the identity of the betrayer, and continue the airdrops in preparation for the arrival of the Allied forces.
From the very first page, I felt a drive to finish the story, and did so in one sitting, pushed forward by the compelling action driving the plot. Elizabeth, as Agent Lisette, and her husband, Guy, are passionate about their love for each other and for helping the French Resistance against the monster-machine of Germany. Elizabeth, as a character, is alive and breathing, a brave and resilient woman that you imagine a real person and not a made-up character in Ms Gauci’s book.
The detailed descriptions and evident research explodes in the narrative in a vibrant well-told story, so much so that the minor glitches are easily overlooked as the author leads you down the fictional path of some of the dangerous and horrific experiences that real people lived during the occupation of France. Ms Gauci is a skilled ‘passeur’ indeed, and as a writer myself can well understand the slight nuances and missteps embedded microscopically in the narrative. In truth, even some of the famous classics have them, such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: (Crusoe removes all his clothes to swim out to the ship to salvage goods. While on board, he fills his pockets with biscuits), or A Study in Scarlett by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Dr. Watson has a war wound in his shoulder. In the Sign of Four, the war wound is now in his leg); or how about the Iliad by Homer (Menelaos kills Pylaimenes in combat; however later in the story, Pylaimenes is still alive to witness the death of his son.) - none of these slips take away from the bodies of work, but instead they’ve been assigned a place of honour as classics. So, I say Ms Gauci’s book is in good company, and is a tale which kept me reading late into the night in eager anticipation.
From the outset, the inciting incident, you are sucked into this story as Guy is holed up in a run-down shack fighting for his life as wolves edge closer, smelling the blood from his injuries. The lush descriptions reel you in - “Guy remained motionless but the wolf knew he was there. There was intelligence in his eyes: one born out of the wild, scanning the surroundings for danger or opportunity. He had seen their determination before, when a pack broke into a cowshed, devouring the calves. The sight had haunted him for weeks after.” - Such a picture that encompasses the imagery of the dark “wolves” of the SS lurking nearby and hungry for blood.
I really liked the poignant passages about what war brings out in a person - ‘How can you really tell until you are faced with the real thing? Fighting for your country in your country when your family and friends’ lives depend on it is quite different to exercises in the Scottish countryside. War brings out something in us we never thought we had – survival.....” and “we can only teach you so much, someone had said, but nothing will prepare you for the time when you’re confronted with eliminating another human being, especially if that person is someone you thought you could trust.”
“War is hell”, American Civil War General Sherman said, and that is the truth, and Ms Gauci’s book displays all the raw emotion and visceral hell under the hellions of Hitler’s regime; and she balances the brutality with the pure love of a husband and wife desperate for a life after the war, the beauty of the French landscape against the dark lurking Nazis, and the tragedy of betraying enemies against the bonding of friendships gluing together under the most trying of situations.
This is well worth a read and earns four stars from The Historical Fiction Company.
Dee Marley
HFC CEO