GRUDAERT'S DIAMONDS

May 1940, and Flight Lieutenant Don Squires is shot down over the Champagne region of France. Little does he realise this will be an event that changes his life forever. Growing numbers of people are fleeing the advancing German Army, Don among them, and it's here that he meets Eloïse Giraudan and her baby for the first time.

Meanwhile in Antwerp, what has driven Joachim van Roecke to kill his employer, Leon Grudaert, proprietor of Grys & Grudaert, and steal his entire stock of industrial diamonds? Is it greed, or does Joachim have other motives...?

In the German camp, Hauptsturmfuehrer Kurt Moëhring of the SS and Oberleutnant Otto Fürst are at loggerheads as they desperately hunt for the stolen diamonds, essential to maintain the production of weapons of war. But what is causing this friction?

“Filled with twists and turns that keeps the reader gripped. Stonehouse manages to keep all the pace and suspense that a good novelist should. It’s hard to believe that this is his first book. A wonderful plot leads to an equally brilliant end, which anyone with a love for war novels or simply good literature should read”

Hanna Collier, Burton Mail

Image: Wartime fiction novel, cover of the world war two (WW2, WWII) thriller set in the Champagne region of France. An exciting tale of French life under the Vichy Government.

Image: Photographic portrait of John Stonehouse, author of the wartime fiction thriller novel entitled Grudaert's Diamonds - an exciting tale of life in France under the Vichy Government.

The author was born before the Second World War in early 1937, and remembers the odd letters arriving from his French Grandparents complete with the rubber stamps of the swastika and the Red Cross.

Educated at Derby Central School for boys in Derby, he has pursued a varied career involving; Stage Management, National Service, where he served on an Algerine minesweeper where much to his French mother's amusement he was part of a boarding party that boarded a French Fishing trawler that was caught fishing within the limits. Following a career in Sales and Marketing Management he finally retired to the Limousin region of France, where he started to write in the idyllic surroundings around the house he and his wife, Tara, bought bordering the river Tardoire.

John L Stonehouse

AUTHOR

GRUDAERT'S DIAMONDS

The author was born before the Second World War in early 1937, and remembers the odd letters arriving from his French Grandparents complete with the rubber stamps of the swastika and the Red Cross.