Ormerod's Landing

Historians of the Second World War have hitherto omitted to mention that
the first British raid on German-occupied France took place within four
months of Dunkirk. It happened at midnight on September 21st, 1940, the
landing being made at the small fishing town of Granville, in Normandy.
The landing party consisted of a detective-sergeant of the Metropolitan
Police (V Division), a young French woman schoolteacher and an ugly
mongrel dog named Formidable. They were considerately brought ashore by the Germans themselves.
George
Ormerod was the detective sergeant in question, not the most
imaginative of policemen, but, true to his name, most resolute in his
investigations. (An ormer is a notably tenacious shell-fish of the
English Channel.) While the war is being lost all around him, Ormerod
remains obsessed with the mundane murder of a young woman in Wandsworth,
even pursuing his investigations amongst the returning and bewildered
troops.
How the investigation blazed a savage trail through rural
Normandy and led to Nazi-occupied Paris, and how Marie- Thérèse Velin
and her often ruthless Resistance allies become involved with George
Ormerod are questions Leslie Thomas answers as his tale unfolds. In Ormerod's Landing,
an exciting and ironic tale of Britain and France in the early years of
the war, he once again creates a tender, farcical world in which his
unique humour and irony flouris