Operation Vienna

 Operation Vienna

Reviewed By  Janet Mawdesley       October 6, 2026

 

Author  Michael Ridpath

Distributor:      Amazon
ISBN:                 978-1807030186
Publisher:         Boldwood Books
Release Date:   5 October 2026  

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A suicide that looks like more of a murder than the Police are prepared to accept attracts the interest of Esme Carmichael a young journalist who is desperate to be accepted as an International Correspondent. She works for Sir Archibald Laverick as his research assistant and is determined to once again drag Archie into what she considers as a murder that needs solving.

Operation Vienna is set in Vienna at a time when the world was once again beginning to feel the pressure of political and financial instability. It is 1931, the Press Corps in Vienna is more of a Club with an interest in filing a good story and is also more than sure that the death of Howland Weston Witherell was suicide.

Reluctantly Archie agrees to sideline their research into his latest Biography, that of Prince Eugene of Austria, and as Esme continues to follow the tip off received from Joe Morrelli, a journalist both she and Archie have worked with before, she begins to believe she may well be right, as the facts are beginning to look a lot like carefully contrived fiction.

Clandestine love affairs ripe with salacious gossip somehow seem to be at the bottom of the entire sordid business of Howland Witherall’s ’suicide’ which now appears to be far more complex than a man who came to Vienna to be psychoanalysed by the famous Dr Birnbaum, a man who worked and trained with Sigmund Freud.

While investigating the suicide, Esme comes across another lead which will not only teach her a lot about loyalty, give her what she so dearly covets a breakthrough to be taken seriously as a foreign Correspondent, but adds a further series of questions needing to be answered into the death of Witherall, which places her in great danger.

With Book 2 of The Foreign Correspondent series, Michael Ridpath weaves a very delicately balanced plot that blends history with fiction set in a country poised on the edge of financial disaster, which is both enthralling and entertaining as it offers an insight into events that eventually lead up to the Second World War.

Crime, Fiction, Historical