felix haynes

Simon Fraser, 25th chief of one of Scotland’s most prominent clans, became a great British commando leader in World War II.Felix Haynes’ third historical fiction novel imagines an earlier, 1930s rise to greatness for the man Winston Churchill called the handsomest man to cut a throat.After refining his superb leadership skills in the British Army’s famed Lovat Scouts, Fraser successfully represents his Inverness district’s economic interests in Parliament by obtaining funds to construct a dam where Loch Ness flows into the River Ness. He also helps the counter-espionage unit MI5 ferret out a traitorous conspiracy between the Scottish head of Fraser’s political party and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.Recalled to active Army service on the eve of World War II and placed in command of the Scouts, Fraser fulfills a 700-year Fraser Clan commitment when Churchill teams him with Special Air Service founder David Stirling to defend Britain against a German effort to lower Britain’s morale by stealing three important symbols of sovereignty: the Stone of Destiny, the Honors of Scotland, and the British crown jewels. After Haynes’s pre-war fictional introduction to Fraser, the outstanding true record he set as a wartime leader helping fulfill Churchill’s charge to all his special operations units to set Europe ablaze follows naturally.