BLOOD AND FIRE: This update's page has been written by guest reviewer A read of this book confirms that unsolved celebrity murders are not the sole domain of Dominick Dunne. Granted, however, its author, John Marquis, had more to work with than Dunne on his best case: the turmoil of World War II, money laundering, British royalty, colonial power, obstruction of justice, and, at its center, the brutal murder of the British Empire's richest man -- all this in a subtropical paradise. It was a dark and stormy night (really) in 1943 when Harry Oakes was viciously slain in his Nassau bedroom. Oakes, a crusty prospector, had made his fortune in northern Ontario's gold fields. How he ended up in the Bahamas is its own story. Once there, Oakes (Sir Harry, by this time), having risen to peerage in the fashion of media mogul Conrad Black) became a business associate and friend of H.G. Christie, a real estate developer whose surname in that country is today a household word. Christie was Oakes' house guest on that fateful night. His only house guest and an avowed sound sleeper. Marquis doesn't dwell on Christie. Rather, he focuses on the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King of England, whom Winston Churchill had shuffled off to the governorship of the Bahamas, a move not at all to the Duke's liking. An avowed fascist with public ties to the Nazis, the Duke was a man with more than one hidden agenda. Marquis makes no accusations. In an ordered objective fashion, he lays out facts (and fictions), including new information supporting previous allegations and rumors. As more closed files are made public -- British and American -- the intrigue will unravel, and in time, by the process of elimination, the probable murderer will stand alone. Still, as Marquis concedes, the protagonists have succumbed to age: no noose will ever tighten around a murderer's neck. Blood and Fire is perhaps the most revealing book written to date about the Oakes murder. Expect more.
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