Staying Alive (Prequel to The SOE quartet Ser.)

"After Rosie Ewing (SOE wartime secret agent) had read Alexander Fullerton's four novels based on her adventures in German-occupied France, she wrote to him suggesting that he might like to hear the story of her first deployment, when she'd parachuted into moonlit countryside near Cahors and made her way down to Toulouse to join the SOE network as a radio-operator and courier. With no source of information about this first mission, he had begun instead by writing of her second outing, which became Into the Fire, followed by Return to the Field, In at the Kill and Single to Paris." "SOE (Special Operations Executive) was an organisation employing exceptionally courageous men and women who had the icy nerves necessary for that sort of work, as well as certain specialist skills, and in the case of 'F' Section fluent French. Rosie was twenty-four at the time, and the expected life-span of a radio-operator was something like six weeks." "She did a lot better than that - in 2002 she was eighty-four. She and Alexander Fullerton met in Toulouse, at a reunion of surviving wartime agents, and the story emerged, over meals and drinks and strolls along the banks of the Garonne, of a group codenamed Countryman who, in the late autumn of 1942, were briefed by London to get a certain German out of Vichy's hands. What they didn't know was that they themselves were being sold out to the Gestapo." "Of course they were aware of betrayal as a constantly looming danger. All too many SOE networks had been 'blown', with agents disappearing into Gestapo cellars and the extermination camps. It was the dread every agent lived with every minute of every day and night - the essence of the tale Rosie had lived to tell - and, extraordinarily, a life-or-death issue once again during the course of the reunion."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.