The Emperors Coloured Coat - John Biggins

John Biggins

Category: Adventure

Narrator: Nigel Patterson

Tags: Adventure, Bestsellers, Historical Fiction

Early in the year 1912, the recently-promoted Lieutenant Ottokar Prohaska finds himself stuck as a gunnery officer aboard a battleship mostly moored in harbor. He answers a War Ministry advertisement for training as a naval air pilot, but he soon finds himself appointed aide-de-camp for aviation to the appalling, boorish, near-insane Austro-Hungarian heir-apparent: the Archduke Franz Ferdinand., After breaking a leg in a flying accident, Prohaska is relieved of his duties, and upon his recovery, he is posted to a river gunboat on the Danube. After an ill-considered liaison with a Polish opera singer, he flees her vengeful husband into Serbian territory. There, a case of mistaken identity enmeshes him in a Serbian anarchist plot to kill the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff with a small diversionary operation in the town of Sarajevo - the assassination of the Archduke.