Vermisst by Jonathan Nicholas is the best book I’ve read for a long time. Vermisst (Missing) is the fictionalised account of  Paul Goetz, a WW2 Luftwaffe fighter pilot who left school to become an air force mechanic, trained on the French coast as a pilot and was transferred to the Russian front where he fought with the Luftwaffe until a crash-landing led to his capture.

The second phase of Goetz’ story is his survival in the Russian POW and political prisoner system until his release in the 1950s.

It is a detailed account of Goetz’s time in the Hitler Youth before the outbreak of WW2 with interesting perspectives on the news and propaganda of the time. His time as a mechanic is described in detail as his perception of the heroic pilots. The accounts of his pilot training are both scary and fun in equal measures as are his early flights as a wingman out over the Channel, including the first of several crash-landings.

The accounts of both the planes and the relationships with his fellow pilots are fascinating in their complexity and at times their luxury which is soon seen in grim contrast to his life after being captured. One has to suspect the descriptions of his imprisonment, although not lacking in adversity, deprivation and deaths is somewhat less well-described even though he seemed to spend more years in this situation than on active duty in the Luftwaffe. The most poignant moment for me, in this rather long book, was when Goetz read a letter from his childhood friend’s mother informing him of his parents’ death in an air raid; he only received the letter many years later and just before his release.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was a refreshingly new voice ad perspective on a well-told story.

I really enjoyed reading Bee Conspiracy by David Boito in which an old-fashioned LAPD officer and a US Fish and Wildlife Special Agent investigate an ultra-greedy businessman who foments mass-hysteria associated with aggressive African bees to prompt the mayor’s office to exterminate the city’s biological bees and so create a lucrative market for his patented, electronic bee.

Special Agent Kelso Bagley, an entomologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service teams ups with Det. John Alan “Duke” Wayne, a middle-aged LA detective to investigate the death of Howard Skulberry, a UCLA entomologist, who died after bees attacked and stung him in his front yard. Duke assumes the death is accidental, but Kelso disagrees. And the media is attempting to create a sensational killer bee danger in Los Angeles.

The CEO of Sage Chemical Gordon Lund has hatched a scheme and Skulberry was in possession of a key piece of technology – a prototype of an artificial bee. Lund and several associates have prepared well and are ready to unleash a bee-storm on the city with the obvious solution being a bee eradication plan. This of course would be devastating to the ecology with no bees to pollinate crops and that’s why Lund’s artificial bees will become so valuable – and lucrative.

The story is very well-written, the characters’ back stories are well-developed and interact realistically. The plot ticks along at a good pace, there are exciting, life-threatening scenes and even a dramatic helicopter chase. A good read.

A Puzzle For Two by Josh Lanyon is the story of Zach Davies, a struggling private investigator who has taken over his father’s not-so-successful firm. A wealthy businessman, Alton Beacher, hires Zach to investigate who is trying to kill him. Beacher is unlikeable and has made many enemies, some of whom are close relatives, including his wife whose family was the primary investor in his business Beacher’s claims of death threats seem to lack credibility and this is made worse by his insistence that Zach pose as Beacher’s boyfriend as an attempt to encourage his wife to divorce him. I like a story to be credible and this detail stretch that somewhat.

Zach’s inexperience and lack of resources prompts him to ask for help from another private investigator and ex-Marine, Flint Carey. Beacher is in fact killed in a car ‘accident’ and although the police investigate so too do Flint and Zach. When Zach is attacked in his garage Flint arrives to help and comfort him. To avoid spoilers, I’ll stop there.

I can’t say this was a great read. The gay agenda seemed too prominent. I mean, I wanted to read a detective/whodunnit story rather than a gay romance.

The Ski Trip by Sarah Clarke is the story of Ivy, a new single-mother, friend-ish of Zoe, Zoe’s husband, Tom, and several other friends from their long-ago university years.

Ivy receives a somewhat out of the blue call from Zoe requesting/begging her go to France because of Tom’s death on ski trip with several other of their mutual friends. Being a new mother, and Zoe being a somewhat estranged friend, the request is awkward. Ivy’s anxiety-ridden mother isn’t really in a good shape to look after Ivy’s son, but Ivy is insistent, desperate and…  

In France, Ivy doubts and then questions most of what has happened, who was involved and why. Tom was an excellent skier; could he really have skied off a well-marked cliff? The slope wasn’t dangerous and relationships within the group of friends were strained in the days before his ‘fall’. Ivy suspects foul play and so does the police chief, but there’s no evidence. Ivy is torn between justice for Tom and getting home to help her son and her anxious mother.

This is a crisply-written story, broken into well-structured chapters that kept me reading quickly. The characters’ back stories (their university and early career years) are credible and interesting; and flawed. Everyone is a suspect.

I really enjoyed reading this; it was a cut-above the rest of the simple, present-day whodunit genre. And I LOVED the twist at the end, followed by the extra twist in the last page.

One Beats the Bush by Riall Nolan is a fast read, an intriguing, twisty, action-packed plot involving a small cast of well-moulded characters.

Max Donovan, a Vietnam flies back to San Francisco after he’s informed that his old friend Fat Freddie Fields has been arrested for murder. The DA seems hell-bent on a quick conviction and so is barely interested in investigating the crime. Acquiring the bail money meant messing with local drug dealers, but Donovan gets his mate out of jail, it being too much of a reminder of their past in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

Donovan’s only clue to solving the murder seems to be in New Guinea and that involves a flight, local politics and crime, smugglers, weapons, and hostile hill tribes. Donovan and his female supporter fly into a hill tribe area to find a helicopter crash site and possible clues to the murder back in San Francisco, encounter a corrupt US missionary but also find the necessary information… and by great luck and immense skill they make it out of New Guinea and back to the US just in time blow apart a smuggling operation that of course involves that corrupt DA.

It’s a fast-paced plot, the characters are likeable when they need to be and the whole story ends with a satisfying climax.