Thank you for inviting me to the Authors Lounge to tell you about my best-selling novel.
The Secret of the Grand Hôtel du Lac. It was inspired by real events set in the Jura and Franche-Comté regions in eastern France on the border with Switzerland. Largely rural, the area is characterized by gentle mountains, fertile agricultural valleys, pine forests, and beautiful Lakes. When I first went to the region for two months, I really had no idea what I would uncover as there are so few WWII books written about this area, yet underneath all this beauty and tranquility, I unearthed some of the harshest reprisals and treachery to take place in France during WWII. The house where I stayed, which was next to Lake Bonlieu, was once a hotel. The previous owner built it after her first hotel, a mere two hundred metres or so away, was burned to the ground by the Gestapo in 1944. No trace exists of the original hotel today, but I learned from a friend that the owner had once hid members of the resistance and helped escapees fleeing into neutral Switzerland.
Further research alerted me to many commemorative “tombs” or gravestones in a multitude of places from the side of the road, in villages, fields, and in the mountains. I wondered why there where so many and most of them within a six-month period of 1944. My curiosity led me to uncover that these events were the result of severe German reprisals against the resistance and maquis for not only aiding escapees into Switzerland, but for acts of sabotage preceding Operation Overlord, otherwise known as D-Day. The German Command in the region operated from Dijon, Besançon and Lyon, and under what was known as “Operation Frühling” (Operation Spring), from early 1944, they recruited hundreds of collaborators to hunt down the resisters. Those who were not executed were deported to Germany, particularly the camp at Mittelbau-Dora, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where inmates were forced to work on the V-1 and V-2 flying bomb. This was also the most intense period when the resistance was being aided by SOE (Special Operations Executive) agents parachuted into France to train and supply them with arms.
My protagonists are based on real secret agents who worked in the area and in whose footsteps I walked in while researching for the story. Elizabeth is based on Diana Rowden, an SOE agent who was sent to Clairvaux-les-Lacs and not long after, picked up by the Gestapo and later executed as a result of a traitor infiltrating the organisation. Sadly this was all too common as the Germans paid well to any collaborator who would betray a British agent, particularly the leader of a network. The second SOE agent who inspired my book and who I created as Elizabeth’s missing husband, Guy – agent “Daniel” – was Harry Ree. A part of his mission was to sabotage the Peugeot factory and after being shot four times, he escaped to Switzerland from where he continued to operate the network.
To get a sense of how hazardous the escape routes into Switzerland were, I followed an escape route through the Risoux Forest to Lake Joux in Switzerland itself, where a monument commemorating the passeurs who aided the escapees, now stands. It is in six languages. For years, the smugglers were shunned, but they were very brave people and saved many lives.
Many of the events in the book actually took place, such as Bloody Sunday in Saint-Claude, not far from the Swiss border. Klaus Barbie took part in this massacre and deportation.
The Secret of the Grand Hôtel du Lac is one of five WWII books I have written set in France, each in different areas and all based on real events. It has been an honour to speak about it during various international talks such as the Los Angeles AKM Book Club: CULTURE & LITERATURE NIGHTS, and the Goethe Literary event in Hyderabad, India. It was also a finalist in the International 2021 Hemmingway Awards for 20th-century Wartime Fiction and took out The Coffee Pot Book Club Gold Medal Book of the Year 2021 in Wartime Fiction.
Available from Amazon. Also on Audio.
Website: https://www.kathryngauci.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KGauciAuthor/
Back Cover Blurb
From USA TODAY Bestselling Author, Kathryn Gauci, comes an unforgettable story of love, hope and betrayal, and of the power of human endurance during history’s darkest days. Inspired by true events,
“Sometime during the early hours of the morning, he awoke again, this time with a start. He was sure he heard a noise outside. It sounded like a twig snapping. Under normal circumstances it would have meant nothing, but in the silence of the forest every sound was magnified. There it was again. This time it was closer and his instinct told him it wasn’t the wolves. He reached for his gun and quietly looked out through the window. The moon was on the wane, wrapped in the soft gauze of snowfall and it wasn’t easy to see. Maybe it was a fox, or even a deer. Then he heard it again, right outside the door. He cocked his gun, pressed his body flat against the wall next to the door, and waited. The room was in total darkness and his senses were heightened. After a few minutes, he heard the soft click of the door latch.”
February 1944. Preparations for the D-Day invasion are well advanced. When contact with Belvedere, one of the Resistance networks in the Jura region of Eastern France, is lost, Elizabeth Maxwell, is sent back to the region to find the head of the network, her husband Guy Maxwell. It soon becomes clear that the network has been betrayed. An RAF airdrop of supplies was ambushed by the Gestapo, and many members of the Resistance have been killed. Surrounded on all sides by the brutal Gestapo and the French Milice, and under constant danger of betrayal, Elizabeth must unmask the traitor in their midst, find her husband, and help him to rebuild Belvedere in time for SOE operations in support of D-Day.
The Secret of the Grand Hôtel du Lac is a gripping and emotional portrait of wartime France… a true-page-turner. “Dripping with suspense on every page” — JJ Toner
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