Playing with Matches Books in Order

Playing with Matches sits in a different place from Lee Strauss's mysteries and romances. It is historical fiction rooted in wartime Germany, and it is much more interested in conscience, propaganda, and the small acts of courage that can grow under a brutal system.

The central figure is Emil.

At the start, Emil Radle is a loyal member of the Hitler Youth. He believes what he has been taught. He admires strength, wants to serve, and thinks the future has already been decided for him. That certainty begins to fall apart when forbidden radio broadcasts expose him and his friends to a version of the war they have never been allowed to hear.

That change matters because the book is not built around heroes who always knew better. It is built around teenagers learning, too late and at real risk, that truth and loyalty are not the same thing. Emil, Moritz, Johann, and Katharina move from belief to doubt to resistance, and every step of that path feels dangerous.

The setting matters a great deal here. Strauss uses the pressure of wartime life, public performance, private fear, and the narrowing options of young people caught inside the regime. The tension does not come only from battlefields. It comes from secrecy, surveillance, and the knowledge that even a leaflet can destroy a life.

This page also connects with companion material like A Piece of Blue String, which fits the same emotional and historical lane. So readers coming here should expect a more grounded, serious side of Strauss's writing.

If the mysteries are about uncovering hidden truths after the fact, Playing with Matches is about what it costs to recognize the truth while history is still happening. It is intimate, tense, and built around ordinary people trying to stay human in a world that rewards the opposite.