peter c whitaker

1930’s Britain the Ministry of Social Biology (MoSB) is responsible for improving the health of the nation along eugenic principles. Spring Bank opens to take into care the feeble-minded, the dissolute, the deformed of body, from private and charitable hospitals. Brinley Valentine Husher is the newly appointed Secretary of State for Social Biology and he is determined to make Britain a country made strong through Eugenics. He hosts an Extraordinary International Eugenics Congress aboard the new R102 airship to promote his new ministry.

For Grace Fielding and Thomas Morrow the reality of Spring Bank and the MoSB is the threat of enforced euthanasia. They are the young disabled, newly arrived in a facility that is already turning inhuman, and they are attracting the vicious attention of the Red Band trustees; if the Red Bands do not kill them first then the dysgenic policies of the MoSB surely will!

There is a secret war being fought in Britain, however, between the Verdure, a shadowy cabal of wealth and political power, and the Indivisibles, a disparate group of individuals opposed to eugenics. Grace, Tom, and their friends become unwitting pawns in this unknown war, racing by car, train, and aeroplane across the country to keep one step ahead of their enemies. For Tom it is a fight for life but for grace it is a struggle to discover who she really is and why she is being pursued so resolutely by the beautiful face of the MoSB; Helene Monroe. For the reader it is a dark adventure in a Britain that might have been if Eugenics had triumphed.