Dominion

In the intriguing prologue of Sansom’s solid what-if historical thriller, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax succeeds Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 9, 1940, instead of Winston Churchill. Later that year, Britain makes peace with Germany. Flash forward to 1952. While the country is not technically under Nazi occupation, its citizens live in fear of speaking their minds, and Churchill heads a shadowy resistance movement. David Fitzgerald, a senior official in the Dominions Office, begins to rebel against his country’s leadership after the tragic accidental death of his almost-three-year-old son, and is tapped to aid the resistance in a plan to free a scientist who carries a potentially world-changing secret. Sansom’s prose is as assured as ever, but his plotting doesn’t match that of his clever Elizabethan historicals (Dissolution, etc.). Fans of such Nazi triumphant novels as Len Deighton’s SS-GB and Robert Harris’s Fatherland will find this a satisfying, if more predictable read. (Jan.)