“Amelia Lambe & The Search for the Light” was launched by Carl Hubbard, a data manager in the Mater Hospital in Dublin.
A health worker since 2004, the book was launched in the iconic Hodges Figgis Bookstore in Dublin’s city centre, exactly thirty years since he took up his first job there.
Hubbard invested over five years of research and writing in an inventive bid to capture his eighteen years of varied booktrade experience. In doing so, he has created the first female special agent to appear in a novel in decades.
Speaking at the launch, the author said he had wanted to find a way to, in particular, record his unique sales roles traversing the UK and Ireland: his ambition was “to write something that would entertain and take readers away from the drudgery of everyday life, not to write an “Irish novel” per se but something to reflect his own reading choices and youthful ruminations on life beyond his depressed hometown. He said this is but the first in a series of action adventure novels, featuring the uniquely glamorous Amelia Lambe and the next novel will be a continuation of her exciting and danger-filled “accidental occupation”.
With an historically accurate backstory established, the widowed Amelia enters the fray in 1942, just as the Americans are taking up their role in World War Two. Relying on historically accurate locations, set-pieces and characters, Hubbard seamlessly takes the reader from the Eastern Front at the end of the Great War, through the Nazi’s early years, culminating in a plausible plot which sees Amelia uncovering and thwarting a Nazi plan to destroy searchlight stations across the Allied nations. Of course, the first Allied nation in the way of enemy aggression was Great Britain and so this first story takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of wartime Britain and Northern Ireland, reminding us that, in fact, US involvement began in the nissan huts of the short-lived army bases dotted across Northern Ireland.
An ambitious new take joining up the two wars, the book’s back page says it all:
“Epitomising the glamour and decadence of the era, Amelia Lambe is the quintessential English free spirit, combining her sexual magnetism with wily panache: Amelia uncovers the enemy within and annihilates men with an evil mission”.
The vengeful Meixmoron (pronounced “Mymoron”) and his hatred of the Americans, follows his near-death experience at the end of The Great War at the hands of the most decorated US airman – Rickenbacker was indeed the first American air ace of World War One). His revenge is to target Allied searchlight stations, an untried Nazi plotline that he sells to the erstwhile conquerors, in a tale that spans locations from the Alps to Belfast, and from Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest to the Himalyas”. It’s a plot that unravels as Amelia steps in to frustrate and disrupt this new plan for total aerial domination of the skies above Britain, a plan that will make the “Battle of Britain” seem like a brief rehearsal.
The book is now available in Eason’s bookshops nationwide; in Hodges Figgis; online; and directly from the author on carl3684@gmail.com
