Fiction

Title: Honor Due
Author: D. H. Brown
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Andrew Lubin

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0979874416

In Honor Due, the Major is an ex-Special Forces Vet whose years in 'Nam taught him the art of war. He'd worked covertly for the government until the '90s, when bone-tired of the killing, he walked away and lost himself in the Pacific Northwest. Until he's targeted by a Special Ops team, and forced to resume hunting in the old way. When he find his old Montagnard friend, former Rhade Striker, tortured and killed, and his friend's daughter hiding in the forest, he vows to take the vengeance owed his fallen brother and family. The Major's new mission is to unearth what happened 35 years earlier as South Vietnam was falling, that has triggered the current pursuit. Still mourning his Rhade wife and children killed in that far-away jungle, he doesn't expect to find, and does, another chance at love. Honor Due speaks for the soul of our citizen warriors, appealing to readers of both genders interested in the way soldiers view the world. Without glamorizing violence, Honor Due offers a tense drama and insights into the warrior's code, honor, personal responsibility and the necessity of keeping fang and claw sharp in this age of terrorism.

Title: Behold an Ashen Horse
Author: Lee and Vista Boyland
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Rob Ballister

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 160145290X

Five U.S. cities are destroyed by Islamic terrorists using nuclear devices. MG George Alexander, Secretary of Homeland Security, becomes president, forms an interim government, pulls the nation together, and then confronts the Islamic whirlwind sweeping across the globe.

Title: Two Brothers - One North, One South
Author: David H. Jones
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Rob Ballister

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0979689856

Walt Whitman feared that the real war would never get in the books: the true stories that depicted the courage and humanity of soldiers who fought, bled, and died in the American Civil War. Exceptionally researched and keenly accurate to actual events, along with the personages that forged them, David H. Jones's novel spans four years in the midst of America s costliest and most commemorated war. The journey is navigated by the poet, Walt Whitman, whose documented compassion for the wounded and dying soldiers of the war takes him to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., and finds him at the bedside of William Prentiss, a Rebel soldier, just after fighting has ended. As fate has it, William's brother, Clifton, a Union officer, is being treated in another ward of the same hospital, and Whitman becomes the sole link not just between the two, but with the rest of their family as well. The reader is taken seamlessly from Medfield Academy in Baltimore, where the Prentiss family makes its home, to the many battlefields where North and South collide, and even through the drawing rooms of wartime Richmond, where Hetty, Jenny, and Constance Cary are the reigning belles.

Title: Killing Rommel
Author: Steven Pressfield
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Andrew Lubin

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): B005UVRYAI

Steven Pressfield’s quintet of acclaimed, bestselling novels of ancient warfare— Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Last of the Amazons, The Virtues of War, and The Afghan Campaign— have earned him a reputation as a master chronicler of military history, a supremely literate and engaging storyteller, and an author with acute insight into the minds of men in battle. In Killing Rommel Pressfield extends his talents to the modern world with a WWII tale based on the real-life exploits of the Long Range Desert Group, an elite British special forces unit that took on the German Afrika Korps and its legendary commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, "the Desert Fox."

Autumn 1942. Hitler’s legions have swept across Europe; France has fallen; Churchill and the English are isolated on their island. In North Africa, Rommel and his Panzers have routed the British Eighth Army and stand poised to overrun Egypt, Suez, and the oilfields of the Middle East. With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, the British hatch a desperate plan—send a small, highly mobile, and heavily armed force behind German lines to strike the blow that will stop the Afrika Korps in its tracks. Narrated from the point of view of a young lieutenant, Killing Rommel brings to life the flair, agility, and daring of this extraordinary secret unit, the Long Range Desert Group. Stealthy and lethal as the scorpion that serves as their insignia, they live by their motto: Non Vi Sed Arte—Not by Strength, by Guile as they gather intelligence, set up ambushes, and execute raids. Killing Rommel chronicles the tactics, weaponry, and specialized skills needed for combat, under extreme desert conditions. And it captures the camaraderie of this “band of brothers” as they perform the acts of courage and cunning crucial to the Allies’ victory in North Africa.

As in all of his previous novels, Pressfield powerfully renders the drama and intensity of warfare, the bonds of men in close combat, and the surprising human emotions and frailties that come into play on the battlefield. A vivid and authoritative depiction of the desert war, Killing Rommel brilliantly dramatizes an aspect of World War II that hasn’t been in the limelight since Patton. Combining scrupulous historical detail and accuracy with remarkable narrative momentum, this galvanizing novel heralds Pressfield’s gift for bringing more recent history to life.