Publication Date: July 5, 2022
Blackstone Publishing

Genre: Historical Fiction

In Crete during World War II, Alenka, a young woman who fights with the resistance against the brutal Nazi occupation, finds herself caught between her traitor of a brother and the man she loves, an undercover agent working for the Allies.

May 1941. German paratroopers launch a blitzkrieg from the air against Crete. They are met with fierce defiance, the Greeks fighting back with daggers, pitchforks, and kitchen knives. During the bloody eleven-day battle, Alenka, a young Greek woman, saves the lives of two Australian soldiers.

Jack and Teddy are childhood friends who joined up together to see the world. Both men fall in love with Alenka. They are forced to retreat with the tattered remains of the Allied forces over the towering White Mountains. Both are among the seven thousand Allied soldiers left behind in the desperate evacuation from Crete’s storm-lashed southern coast. Alenka hides Jack and Teddy at great risk to herself. Her brother Axel is a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator and spies on her movements.

As Crete suffers under the Nazi jackboot, Alenka is drawn into an intense triangle of conflicting emotions with Jack and Teddy. Their friendship suffers under the strain of months of hiding and their rivalry for her love. Together, they join the resistance and fight to free the island, but all three will find themselves tested to their limits. Alenka must choose whom to trust and whom to love and, in the end, whom to save.

Excerpt

This scene, from The Crimson Thread by Kate Forsyth, is set in Heraklion, Crete, during the Nazi invasion of May 1941. Jack Hawke is a young Australian soldier who retreated with the Australian Imperial Army to Crete after the fall of Greece. He is the only fictional character in the scene. Captain Grigorakis was a Cretan resistance fighter, working with Captain John Pendlebury, a one-eyed British archaeologist-turned-soldier thought to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones. He was shot by the Germans.

The room was dark, lit only by small lanterns hanging from hooks in the ceiling and a few flickering candles in red glass jars. A long wooden bar stretched the length of the room, and giant wine barrels were stacked at one end. The men with Pendlebury were all Greek, dressed in billowing breeches tucked into high leather boots, curved Cretan daggers tucked into mulberry silk sashes, black beaded scarves tied about their heads. One was an old man, oaken-skinned and gaunt, with a neat white goatee. He looked like an Elizabethan pirate, Jack thought, in his long cloak and wine-coloured sash.

‘This is Captain Grigorakis, better known as Satanas,’ Pendlebury said. ‘That’s because only Satan knows how many times he has been wounded, or how many bullets are still inside him. I swear he’d rattle if he was shaken.’

The old man grinned. Jack noticed he was missing a finger.

‘C-c-can you get the radio, sir?’ Jack asked. ‘I’ll need to take a m-m- message back to HQ. They’re getting w-w-w-. . . worried with no news from the west.’

Pendlebury shook his head. ‘Not now, anyway. We’ve just had word the Jerries are trying to break in through Chania Gate, and so there’s no way I can get out now. Nor you, I’m afraid. Things are getting rather hot. We’re going now to try and drive them off. You’d best come with me – we need as many men as we can get.’

Jack nodded, though he felt a little sick. He was thinking of the battle at Thermopylae. They had fired more than six thousand rounds, a record for a day’s fighting. The barrels of their guns had been blackened and smoking with the heat. Many of the gunners bled from the ears, their eardrums burst. And yet the Germans had kept on coming. Like robots. Nothing had stopped them.

Pendlebury put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Stiffen your spine, lad. It won’t be pretty, that’s for sure, but we can’t allow Heraklion to fall. The cable and wireless offices are here, the harbour, the power station, the telephone exchange . . . and the people. We have to protect the people. They are such good souls, salt of the earth. They know what it is to live! We cannot let them be conquered.’

‘W-w-why are the Germans doing it? Why do they b-b-bomb and shoot and kill innocent people who want n-nothing more than to live their lives in peace?’

‘The lust for power? It’s a kind of madness, I think. Certainly for Hitler. I don’t know about the soldiers. They seem to love him, Lord knows why. They certainly follow him blindly.’

‘’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,’ Jack quoted.

‘Indeed,’ Pendlebury answered. ‘Now, “Do as I bid thee, or rather do

thy pleasure; above the rest, be gone.”’

Jack grinned. ‘Yes, sir!’

‘Good lad!’

The next few hours were a blur. Loading, aiming, shooting. Jack’s shoulder ached from the recoil, his eyes stung with smoke. Bright flares shot up into the night sky, lighting up the scene with white intensity, blinding him. The constant barrage of gunshots.

Then the gate was breached. The Jerries were in the town. The Allies were forced to retreat through the rubble. Sharp flare of pain in his thigh. Jack stumbled, fell. He crawled inside a doorway. Put his hand to his leg, brought it away bloody. It wasn’t too bad. A richochet, maybe. He rested a moment, dizzy and sick. Boots pounded past him, and he shrank back into the shadows.

‘Aera!’ a young man shouted, shooting as he ran. ‘Aera!’

It was the Greeks’ war cry. It meant ‘like the wind’. Jack gave a wry grin. Poets even in war. He remembered a story Paddy had told him. When the Germans had marched into Athens, they had forced an old soldier to take down the Greek flag flying over the Acropolis and replace it with the swastika. The old soldier did as he was ordered, but then refused to hand the Greek flag over. Instead, he calmly wrapped himself in it and threw himself off the ancient citadel, crying ‘Aera!’ His broken body was found hundreds of feet below, still wrapped in the bloodstained flag.

These Greeks, Jack thought, will fight to the death. They truly are heroes.

He found the courage to struggle up, and run out to join the battle once more.

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About the Author

Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel at the age of seven, and is now the internationally bestselling author of 40 books for both adults and children.

Her books for adults include ‘Beauty in Thorns’, the true love story behind a famous painting of ‘Sleeping Beauty’; ‘The Beast’s Garden’, a retelling of the Grimm version of ‘Beauty & the Beast’, set in the German underground resistance to Hitler in WWII; ‘The Wild Girl’, the love story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild, the young woman who told him many of the world’s most famous fairy tales; ‘Bitter Greens’, a retelling of the Rapunzel fairytale; and the bestselling fantasy series ‘Witches of Eileanan’ Her books for children include ‘The Impossible Quest’, ‘The Gypsy Crown’, ‘The Puzzle Ring’, and ‘The Starkin Crown’

Kate has a doctorate in fairytale studies, a Masters of Creative Writing, a Bachelor of Arts in Literature, and is an accredited master storyteller.

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