V2
ROBERT HARRIS
(HUTCHINSON, 320 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

With a crash, an adulterous ­liaison in London is devastated by a rocket. It is one of Hitler’s miracle weapons, the V2, which launched in 1944 from occupied Holland, and fell without warning from the sky, wreaking destructive terror.

The fallout prompts Kay Caton-Walsh, the young intelligence officer caught with her older married lover, to volunteer for recently liberated Belgium as part of a daring attempt to thwart the missiles. Because V2s follow a parabolic curve, it is possible with the use of a slide rule to calculate the ­trajectory and work back to the site of the launch. Spitfires can then be scrambled to destroy the launchers. The catch is, this ­calculation must be done in just six minutes.