After his wife’s death, reporter Jeremy Michaels concentrates on writing news stories that try to bring justice to the underdogs of the world, until an announcement by Buckingham Palace shatters his glass cocoon.

The village hermit from the hometown Jeremy fled is to be knighted for still-classified services during World War II, a man Jeremy knows well from a certain childhood adventure. The editor of the newspaper Jeremy writes for sends him back home to find out why, but he is scooped by the hometown paper’s revelation that the man worked inside the French Resistance. Yet the knighthood is refused, and Jeremy’s chance to save his job–and an old friendship–lies in discovering the truth.

Jeremy Michaels, a reporter, arrives in his hometown with memories of his wife’s miscarriage and her death. The local newspaper once run by his grandfather is now run by Clemence Mercia a distant cousin who wishes him luck trying to speak to Thomas Thoreaux who has been offered a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II which is now Jeremy’s job to find out why?

The story then takes us through Thomas Thoreaux’s life in the resistance, the intrigue, and the sadness of those times. I liked the historical details and the emotions I felt as I read Saving Thomas. I enjoyed Jeremy’s character who is a stickler for the truth and his determination to get everything right and accurate. Thomas Thoreaux’s character was easy to picture in my mind complete with his unhappiness and despair which he sadly couldn’t move forward from after all that had occurred and what he had witnessed.

The story kept me riveted as the tale unfolded. It was a very emotional read with lots of twists and turns added making this a fantastic mystery too. Some scenes included cruelness that was hard to read about, but they were a necessity to make the book come across as realistic. I thought it had a good ending too.

If you like mysteries then this is certainly an excellent read which I can highly recommend. Well done to the author Scott Kauffman for all the historical details, intrigue, and emotion. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Scott claims his fiction career began with an in-class book report written in Mrs. Baer’s eighth-grade English class when, due to a conflict of priorities, he failed to read the book. An exercise of imagination was required. Scott snagged a B, better than the C he received on his last report when he actually read the book. Thus began his life-long apprenticeship as a teller of tales and, some would snidely suggest, as a lawyer as well, but they would be cynics, a race Oscar Wilde warned us knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Scott is the author of the coming-of-age novel Revenants, The Odyssey Home, and the legal-suspense novel, In Deepest Consequences. He was named a finalist in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award and is a recipient of the 2011 Mighty River Short Story Contest and the 2010 Hackney Literary Award. His short fiction has been appeared in Big Muddy, Adelaide Magazine, and Lascaux Review. He is now at work on two novel manuscripts and a collection of short stories.

He is an attorney in Irvine, California, where his practice focuses upon white-collar crime and tax litigation with his clients providing him endless story fodder. He graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and in the upper ten percent of his class from Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, where he was a member of the Environmental Law Review and received the American Jurisprudence Award in Conflict of Laws.

Share your thoughts on Saving Thomas in the comment section below!