TOO BAD TO DIE

TOO BAD TO DIE by Francine Matthews, is a tense and enthralling historical thriller set amid the 1943 Tehran Conference during which British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming—the creator of James Bond—attempts to foil a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.

November, 1943. Weary of his deskbound status in the Royal Navy, intelligence officer Ian Fleming spends his spare time writing fiction that is much more exciting and explosive than his own life. That is until the critical Tehran Conference when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet to plot strategy. What Fleming doesn’t know is that this time, the stakes are extremely high and the game plan perilous.

With the Big Three in one place, Fleming is tipped off that Hitler’s top assassin has infiltrated the conference. Seizing his chance to play a part in a real-life action story, Fleming goes undercover to stop the Nazi killer. Along the way, between martinis with beautiful women, he survives brutal attacks and meets a Soviet spy who may know more than she lets on. As he works to uncover the truth and unmask the assassin, Fleming is forced to accept that betrayal sometimes comes from the most unexpected quarters—and that one’s literary creations may be eerily close to one’s own life.

Brilliantly inventive, utterly gripping and suspenseful, Too Bad to Die is Francine Mathews’s best novel yet, and confirms her place as a master of historical fiction.

Francine Mathews is the author of Jack 1939 and more than twenty other novels of mystery, history, and suspense. Her historical thriller The Alibi Club was named one of the fifteen best novels of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. A graduate of Princeton and Stanford, she spent four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and presently lives and works in Colorado.