In Bob Van Laerhoven’s The Long Farewell, in 1934, Dresden, fifteen-year-old Hermann Becht's family is affected by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. His father, Hans, serves the Nazi movement with growing devotion, while his mother, Marina, a Belarusian refugee who escaped revolutionary Russia, believes Germany...

Suzanne Parry’s The Communist’s Secret begins in 1941, where former Leningrad radio worker Katya Karavayeva joins a Soviet volunteer labor squad, expecting to dig defensive trenches against the German invasion. After a disastrous attack near the Luga River destroys the group, Katya escapes into occupied...

Laurence Hutson’s Shattered Faces is set during the First World War, when American sculptor Anna Ladd leaves Boston for Europe after learning that soldiers with severe facial injuries are hiding themselves from families and society. In London, she studies a new process that uses sculpture,...

Dual Convergence: Witness to History by Angel Giacomo is one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time. The author has brought to life the history of the Roosevelt family in a very down-to-earth way – warts and all. Internal family...

When a leader becomes paranoid, followers lose hope. In Assassin's Mace by Ron McManus, Jake Palmer and Alona Green are US JSOC officers, and they have been assigned their most difficult mission yet: to enter Russia undetected and escape with Dmitry Sokolov, a high-value asset....

The Russia-Ukraine war continues, but Russia’s progress is stalled, and victory looks distant. Keen on Russia’s future in the war, Colonel General Gennady Chuikov, officially declared deceased, summons Major Tomas Arshavin of Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) to propose a strategy dubbed the Barca Maneuver. Through...

Angel Giacomo’s The Jackson MacKenzie Chronicles: Broken Valor puts readers straight into the aftermath of war as Major Harry Russell awakens in a Hawaiian military hospital with only a scant memory of how he arrived there. Among Harry’s first conscious thoughts is his closest friend,...

It is 1941, nine years after the devastating Holodomor in Ukraine. Two years earlier, fifteen-year-old Konstantin “Kostya” Lysenko had missed out on the mass recruitment of the Red Army for boys over the age of eighteen, unlike his older brothers, Petro and Grisha, when World...

Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” Fear is the most prevalent emotion in The Weight of Silence by Alex Baranda, but maybe it’s fear that keeps people alive. Set in 1943, it begins with an elite agent...

V for Victory by John McKay is a most interesting story set during the occupation of Paris by the Germans from June 1940 to July 1944. Events are seen through the eyes of a young Parisian boy, Charles Mercier, who is 13 years old and...