Finished
Len Deighton's
SS-GB, an excellent alternate history murder mystery set in a world where Germany conquered Britain during WWII*. I've been meaning to read a Deighton since the afterword in Charles Stross'
The Atrocity Archives, which also introduced me to Tim Powers by way of
Declare (now one of my favourite hidden history sfnal novels), and after failing to find SS-GB in the library again after my one elusive sighting of it years ago, it finally went on sale a couple of months ago (still $2.99 in Canada), apparently due to having some sort of upcoming adaptation.
Anyway, this was superbly done, mingling a solid murder investigation case with an equally twisty underlying political plot, and depicting the tensions in occupied 1940s Britain, with varying degrees of collaboration and resistance and ever-shifting loyalties and opportunism throughout. And it makes use of the actual history parts of the alternate history for a nicely speculative what-if wrap up to the overall situation. I see I'm going to have to read more Deighton. Beyond his excellent and also recommended
Cookstrip DIY cuisine cartoons, that is, which have been brought back into and then gone out of print, but thanks to the magic of e-books can still be gotten.
* For some reason, all of the not overtly sfnal alt-history murder mysteries (
Fatherland,
Farthing, etc.) I can think of take place in exactly the same setting. And that's before getting into all the other alt-history thrillers that also happen to have solvable murders in them. It's like a mirror universe
Foyle's War, in a way.