Farthing

First published in 2006, Jo Walton''s Farthing was hailed as a masterpiece, a darkly romantic thriller set in an alternate postwar England sliding into fascism.

Eight years after they overthrew Churchill and led Britain into a separate peace with Hitler, the upper-crust families of the "Farthing set" are gathered for a weekend retreat. Among them is estranged Farthing scion Lucy Kahn, who can''t understand why her and her husband David''s presence was so forcefully requested. Then the country-house idyll is interrupted when the eminent Sir James Thirkie is found murdered-with a yellow Star of David pinned to his chest.

Lucy begins to realize that her Jewish husband is about to be framed for the crime-an outcome that would be convenient for altogether too many of the various political machinations underway in Parliament in the coming week. But whoever''s behind the murder, and the frame-up, didn''t reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts and underdogs-and prone to look beyond the obvious as a result.

As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out-a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.