A captivating war novel that immerses readers in the craft of killing and its somber results.
A Royal Air Force pilot battles the Luftwaffe during World War II in Forsyth’s historical novel.
This third installment of the adventures of Allan Chadwick follows the RAF squadron leader into war, which will challenge his skills as a pilot and position him as a catalyst in the innovation of aviation technology. He’s soon commanding a front-line squadron of Spitfire fighter planes in the Battle of Britain and gets shot down several times—once parachuting into the English Channel—in the course of ferocious dogfights with Germany’s fearsome Messerschmitt 109s. Chadwick then goes to work in the obscure but vital area of electronic navigation aids intended to improve the woeful accuracy of British bomber aircraft. He’s in the thick of designing equipment that uses radio beams to guide warplanes precisely to their targets and then testing it on bombing runs over German-occupied Europe. On one raid he gets shot down over France and embarks on a picaresque journey in which he beds a farmer’s two daughters, falls in with the Resistance, and, finally, hijacks a Messerschmitt 110 back to Britain. Put in charge of a precision-bombing unit, he stages a raid on Berlin that interrupts a speech by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, who vows to take personal vengeance for the humiliation. The author, a former RAF pilot, paints a vivid panorama of the air war, including the daily grind of fighter combat that left veterans haggard and twitchy with stress; the hours-long, freezing-cold bombing runs punctuated by storms of anti-aircraft fire; the hair-raising crash landings; and the numbing drumbeat of deaths. His writing mixes fascinating deep dives into the gadgetry and tactics of aerial combat with gripping action scenes conveyed in brutally evocative prose (“Ramsey was prostrate besides his seat, his body lacerated by dozens of shrapnel fragments. His head sagged, and Chadwick could see he was practically decapitated”). Chadwick is an appealing hero—stoic and resourceful, but quietly marked by the horrors unfolding around him.
A captivating war novel that immerses readers in the craft of killing and its somber results.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798985322071
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Yacht Fiona
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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