What was it really like, living in England in the days leading up to World War II? Judging by Mark Chisnell’s novel The Fulcrum Files, it was a time of great confusion and self-delusion. I suspect that picture is accurate.

Ben Clayton, our hero, is an engineer for a British aircraft company, but has been assigned to work on preparing a racing yacht for the America’s Cup race (aeronautics and shipbuilding being sister enterprises). Ben was, as a teenager, one of Britain’s best prospects as a boxer, but he nearly killed another boy in a fight. Horrified, he gave up boxing and became a pacifist.

Pacifism is highly popular and respected in England in 1936. As author Chisnell deftly portrays the era, everybody’s got an ideology—pacifism or communism or Labour or Fascism or Aristocracy, and almost everybody has good intentions. The one thing almost everyone agrees on is that there will not be another war. Impossible. The people wouldn’t stand for another bloodbath like the Great War. Hitler has some legitimate grievances, so throw him a bone and everything will settle down.

But when Ben’s best friend is killed in an accident while fitting a new mast, and that friend is found to have been deeply in debt and involved with shady people, Ben sets out to clear his name. He learns things he’d rather not learn, and eventually has to make choices he’d rather not make. It does no good to avoid the war. The war will not avoid you.

I particularly liked the characters in The Fulcrum Files. They seemed authentic and complex, doing very different, even appalling, things out of a desire to do right. We tend today to see World War II (properly) in very black and white terms, but nobody knew those things in 1936, and Chisnell excels at psychological realism. There’s a love story for the ladies, and lots of boats for those who (like me) enjoy reading about the sea.

The Fulcrum Files does not rise to the heights of the thriller genre, but I enjoy a book that tells a smaller story well. Mild cautions for language, violence, and adult subject matter, but the book is suitable for teens and up.