As much as anything else, reading No Plan B was a
relief. I really liked (indeed, was
consumed by) the original, Lee Child, Jack Reacher books, so I was sad to hear
he was semi-retiring and uncertain how well his plan to collaborate with his
brother, Andrew Child, would work.
And
for me, it did not work in the first book they wrote together. No Plan B, however, was much more
in the old Reacher style and was a
complete success as far as I was concerned.
The bad guys were out-thought, out-fought, and generally got royally
stuffed before Reacher walked off into the sunset. Hurrah! I will certainly be reading their further collaborations.
The gripping new Jack Reacher thriller from the No.1 bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child.
Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus - clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened - a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushed the victim to her death, before grabbing her bag and sauntering away.
Reacher follows the killer on foot, not knowing that this was no random act of…
Ian Kershaw is, to my mind, the best historian of Nazi Germany, and his
biography of Adolf Hitler will long remain the go-to study of the man.
So when I saw a book by him, I automatically
picked it up and glanced through it. It
was riveting. The End explores the
unraveling of life and government in 1945 as the Third Reich imploded.
There are detailed explanations of Nazi
decision-making that lay out the twisted logic that had ordinary Germans being
slaughtered by the thousands by the Nazis even within hours of the final
collapse of the regime. Just as
compelling is his description of ordinary life for ordinary people as the world
seemingly came to pieces around them.
It's not a happy read, but it's a fascinating and great read.
Named Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, TLS, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail and Scotland on Sunday, Ian Kershaw's The End is a searing account of the final months of Nazi Germany, laying bare the fear and fanaticism that drove a nation to destruction.
In almost every major war there comes a point where defeat looms for one side and its rulers cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler's Germany, nothing of this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town by…
Elizabeth Moon is a great writer, consistently able
to sweep you along with her narrative, create (and compromise) complex
characters, and make distant worlds and alien societies credible.
So I was very pleased when she decided to
continue the story of the characters who first appeared in the Vatta’s War
series into a new sequence of books. Into the Fire is only the second of these, but it has got me totally
hooked. There are loose ends, escaped
characters from previous stories, and a really engaging heroine with a very dark
side. What is not to like!
When Admiral Kylara Vatta and a ship full of strangers were marooned on an inhospitable arctic island, they uncovered secrets that someone on Ky's planet was ready to kill to keep hidden. Now, the existence of the mysterious arctic base has been revealed, but the organisation behind it still lurks in the shadows, doing all it can to silence her.
It is up to the intrepid Ky to force the perpetrators into the light, and uncover decades' worth of secrets - some of which lie at the very heart of her family's greatest tragedy.
The product of forty years of research by one of the foremost historians of Jacobitism, this book is a comprehensive revision of Professor Szechi's popular 1994 survey of the Jacobite movement in the British Isles and Europe.
Like the first edition, it is undergraduate-friendly, providing an enhanced chronology, a convenient introduction to the historiography, and a narrative of the history of Jacobitism, alongside topics specifically designed to engage student interest.
This includes Jacobitism as a uniting force among the pirates of the Caribbean and as a key element in sustaining Irish peasant resistance to English colonial rule. As the only comprehensive introduction to the field, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in early modern British and European politics.
