Who killed Sir Harry Oakes?

‘The story has all the right ingredients – rich occupants of a West Indian tax haven, corruption, drugs, the Mafia, and a weak character as governor.’ Daily Mail

July 1943. Sir Harry Oakes — self-made gold millionaire, one of the richest men in the British Empire — is found dead in his Nassau mansion, his body burned and mutilated beyond recognition. No obvious motive. No credible suspect. And a Governor, the Duke of Windsor, seemingly desperate to keep the case quiet.

James Leasor’s brilliant reconstruction of one of the twentieth century’s most baffling unsolved murders goes far beyond the locked rooms of Nassau’s elite. With audacious historical detective work, he draws a startling connection between the Oakes killing, the suspicious burning of the liner Normandie in New York Harbour in 1942, and the Allied landings in Sicily — suggesting that the real story reaches into the darkest corridors of wartime power.

Adapted for television in 1989 as Passion and Paradise, starring Armand Assante and Rod Steiger.

ISBN: 978-1-917837-89-7 (paperback)