Title: Chitose Road
Author: Bob Ruerhdanz
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1456418602
Chitose Road is about a strange cast of Americans stationed on the Island of Hokkaido in the 1950s involving espionage, romance, and crowded living conditions, as they learned how to interact with the Japanese culture during and after the Korean War.
Title: Look Long Into the Abyss
Author: A. R. Homer
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Weymouth Symmes
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1605945315
The Third Reich is collapsing. The rules have changed.
There are no rules.
Nazi Germany, 1945. Hitler Youth on suicide missions…old men hanged for desertion …marauding slave laborers…homeless Germans clogging roads…and looted art hidden all over.
As Hitler’s Germany thrashes in its death throes, Lt. Gina Cortazzo follows close behind the American front to rescue art stolen by the Nazis. Her success awaits the capture of Alt Aussee, the salt mine where the thousands of stolen masterpieces in Hitler’s private collection are hidden.
But SS Brigadeführer Reinhard Hofmann is also heading there with his crack forces, on his way to establish a final fortress where Nazism can hold out. And he is ready to carry out the Führer’s final order: destroy the entire collection, should it be in danger of falling into enemy hands.
Look Long into the Abyss paints a chilling and vivid picture of the last days of World War II. The cast of characters includes Sgt. Bill Terrill, who saves Gina’s life as they cross paths with suicidal Hitlerjugend; Frieda, the mother of a Hitler Youth fighting with Hofmann; Stanislaus, the Polish slave laborer with whom Frieda and her daughter form an unlikely alliance; and Father Hieronymus, the abbot whose monastery harbors more than one dangerous secret.
Throughout the chaos, Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man weaves a spell. Thieved from thieves, lost then found, the priceless work alters the lives of Frieda, Stanislaus, and Gina…and others caught in the maelstrom.
Title: The Corydon Snow
Author: Richard Whitten Barnes
Genre: Fiction, Historical Event
Reviewer: Carmen Stenholm
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1597055484
The white hot story of a WWII freighter, loaded with high explosive fuel, its heroic crew and navy gunners drawn face to face with the most dangerous battle areas of the Pacific. A young Japanese Naval Air cadet trains for a mission that will bring him to in direct conflict with the star-crossed SS Corydon Snow.
Title: Beyond Those Hills: An Officer and a Lady - Private Battles of a Female Warrior
Author: M.H.A. Menondji
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Bob Ruehrdanz
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1441485309
Entrusted with the well being of his late best friend's daughter, Laura, former C.I.A. operative Jim Marshall had kept his promise well beyond what was expected of him. Now an accomplished young woman, Lt. Laura Armitage is the unlikely candidate to an elite US Navy unit. A tragedy shadowing her days, she reports for duty to face discrimination and the cover-ups of the Iran-contras scandal. Struggling to assess her allegiance to the flag, she stands her ground through every mission aware her tenacity may not be enough to earn her respect, including that of her jaded commanding officer, Lt. T.J. Wilkins. Beyond Those Hills: an Officer and a Lady is a multifaceted self-discovery journey amidst the power struggle against then USSR and the rise of terrorism on the world scene. It depicts three lives intertwined by love, death, lust and a sense of duty that rises above politicians' corruption. It is a compelling tale of redemption woven into the private battles of a female warrior. A selection of the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards MWSA 2011 Awards Nominee for Historical Fiction.
Title: Once a Knight: A Novel of Aerial Combat & Romance in World War I
Author: Walt Shiel
Genre: Fiction, Historical Event
Reviewer: Stephen Phillips
ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): I1934631515
World War I: Air combat is invented in the skies above the battlefield.
May 1917: America is gearing up to enter the brutal conflict, and the Sopwith Camel is entering combat service. Many individual Americans, however, have long since signed on to fight the war.
In 1916, Everett Ross quit the Texas Rangers and traveled to England to join the Royal Flying Corps, trading his horse for a Nieuport pursuit biplane. No stranger to violence and death, now-Lieutenant Ross duels with German pilots in the pristine skies above the grimy trenches where foot soldiers fight for victory foot by bloody foot.
Between dogfights, Ross loses his heart to a young French beauty whose domineering mother fights her own battle to protect Geneviéve from this American cowboy wearing a British uniform. Ross soon must decide between love and duty, between orders and necessity.
This fast-moving story combines romance and combat action in a land knocked out of kilter by a deadly war often seemingly without objectives.
As a pursuit pilot in the War to End All Wars, Ross struggles to maintain his own sense of honor and valor in the midst of chaos and death.
The combat sequences are told as only an experienced military pilot and historian can. Walt Shiel, long fascinated by the rapid evolution of aerial warfare in the First World War, has studied innumerable books and articles written by the men who flew and fought in the Great War. His understanding of aviation, combat tactics and their development brings the aerial scenes to vivid life. His knowledge of how those knights of the air lived, loved and died puts the reader in their flying boots and cockpits, complete with the emotions that drove them, the doubts that haunted them, the death that stalked them.