Book Spotlight: Last Train to Freedom by Deborah Swift

 

'Taut, compelling and beautifully written – I loved it!’ ~ DAISY WOOD

'Tense and thought-provoking' ~ CATHERINE LAW

 1940. As Soviet forces storm Lithuania, Zofia and her brother Jacek must flee to survive.

 A lifeline appears when Japanese consul Sugihara offers them visas on one condition: they must deliver a parcel to Tokyo. Inside lies intelligence on Nazi atrocities, evidence so explosive that Nazi and Soviet agents will stop at nothing to possess it.

Pursued across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Express, Zofia faces danger at every turn, racing to expose the truth as Japan edges closer to allying with the Nazis. With the fate of countless lives hanging in the balance, can she complete her mission before time runs out?

‘Such an interesting and original book…. Informative, full of suspense and thrills.’

~ Netgalley Review

 Buy Link:

 Universal Buy Link: http://mybook.to/TransSiberian

 

 

Deborah Swift is the English author of twenty historical novels, including Millennium Award winner Past Encounters, and The Poison Keeper the novel based around the life of the legendary poisoner Giulia Tofana. The Poison Keeper won the Wishing Shelf Readers Award for Book of the Decade. Recently she has completed a secret agent series set in WW2, the first in the series being The Silk Code.

Deborah used to work as a set and costume designer for theatre and TV and enjoys the research aspect of creating historical fiction, something she loved doing as a scenographer. She likes to write about extraordinary characters set against a background of real historical events. Deborah lives in England on the edge of the Lake District, an area made famous by the Romantic Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.

 Author Links:

 Website: www.deborahswift.com

Twitter https://twitter.com/swiftstory

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authordeborahswift/

Pinterest https://www.pinterest.co.uk/deborahswift1/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/deborahswift.bsky.social

Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/deborah-swift

Amazon Author Page: http://author.to/DeborahSwift

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/deborahswiftauthor/

 

 

 

Book Spotlight: Traitor’s Game, Soldier Spy Book One by Rosemary Hayes

 

'Right from page one you know you are in the hands of a talented storyteller... An exciting tale of espionage and adventure in the classic mould.'

~ R.N. Morris, author of The Gentle Axe

1808.

Captain Will Fraser has just returned from the Front in the Peninsular War. He is disgraced and penniless, the victim of a conspiracy led by a jealous and influential officer. Fraser has been falsely accused of insubordination and cowardice and dismissed from his regiment.

Fraser and Duncan Armstrong, his wounded Sergeant, arrive in London to seek out Will’s brother, Jack, who works for King George’s Government.

But Jack has disappeared. He vanished from his lodgings a week ago and no one has seen him since. Friends and colleagues are baffled by his disappearance as is the young woman, Clara, who claims to be his wife.

Then Will is viciously attacked, seemingly mistaken for his brother, and only just escapes with his life. When news of this reaches Jack’s colleagues in Government, Will is recruited to find his brother and he and Armstrong set out to follow a trail littered with half-truths and misinformation.

For their task is not quite what it seems.

Will closely resembles his brother and it becomes evident that he is being used as a decoy to flush out Jack’s enemies. These are enemies of the State, for Jack Fraser is a spy and his colleagues believe he has uncovered evidence which will lead to the identity of a French spymaster embedded in the British Government.

Will’s search leads him to France but in this murky world of espionage, nothing is straightforward.

The soldier turned spy must unmask a traitor, before it's too late.

  Buy Links:

 Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/bwwEee

This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

 

Rosemary Hayes has written over fifty books for children and young adults. She writes in different genres, from edgy teenage fiction (The Mark), historical fiction (The Blue Eyed Aborigine and Forgotten Footprints), middle grade fantasy (Loose Connections, The Stonekeeper’s Child and Break Out)  to chapter books for early readers and texts for picture books. Many of her books have won or been shortlisted for awards and several have been translated into different languages.

Rosemary has travelled widely but now lives in South Cambridgeshire. She has a background in publishing, having worked for Cambridge University Press before setting up her own company Anglia Young Books which she ran for some years. She has been a reader for a well-known authors’ advisory service and runs creative writing workshops for both children and adults.

Rosemary has now turned her hand to adult fiction and her historical novel ‘The King’s Command’ is about the terror and tragedy suffered by a French Huguenot family during the reign of Louis XIV.

And Traitor’s Game, the first book in the Soldier Spy trilogy, set during the Napoleonic Wars, has recently been published.

 Author Links:

 Website: www.rosemaryhayes.co.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HayesRosemary

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rosemary-Hayes/e/B00NAPAPZC

 

Wreckage from Secret Cold War Spy Mission Revealed in Aerial Images

By Jillian Rose Lim

 

An old war plane, the Kee Bird, sits frozen in Greenland.
Credit:  IceBridge Digital Mapping System

In 1947, a crash landing left wreckage from a U.S. Army plane frozen in time on a remote ice sheet in northwest Greenland.
A new aerial image, released by NASA's Earth Observatory, shows the remains of the B-29 Superfortress plane, named Kee Bird, which was en route to the North Pole for a top secret mission during the Cold War.
After encountering bad weather and running out of fuel, the plane made an emergency landing on a lake frozen beneath hard-packed snow. The crew of 11 men spent about three days in the tundra before they were rescued. Forty years later, famous test pilot Darryl Greenamyer and his team tried to restore the warbird, but the plane caught fire and the team abandoned their project. Now, more than 50 years after the Kee Bird landed, wind-blown ice and snow continue to bury what's left of it.
The photo was taken by a digital camera attached to NASA's P-3 Orion airplane on May 1. The research plane is part of Operation IceBridge, an eight-year NASA mission that started in 2009 and began its 2014 Arctic campaign this past March.
Operation IceBridge surveys glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic to monitor how polar ice changes over time. Scientists use instruments attached to fixed-wing aircraft; those tools include radars, lasers and the Digital Mapping System (DMS) that snapped the image of Kee Bird.

IceBridge's P-3 research plane shadows over the Kee Bird
Credit:  Michael Studinger, NASA GSFC

View full size image

The missions often bring back stunning images and discover objects buried underneath the ice. In August 2013, IceBridge researchers found Earth's longest canyon beneath Greenland's ice sheet. The gorge reaches about 2,600 feet (800 meters) deep and 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide, making it comparable to America's Grand Canyon.
When it comes to the Arctic, landmarks like the Kee Bird can lend beauty to an otherwise blank canvas.
"When you spend eight hours a day, five days a week staring at a blinding white ice sheet, something interesting to look at comes as a rather welcome sight," John Sonntag, a researcher for NASA's Wallop Flight Facility told the Earth Observatory. Sontaag has been collecting photos of the Kee Bird since the early 1990s.
Another image, also released by the Earth Observatory, shows both the Kee Bird and the shadow of the P-3 Orion above the plane's wreckage. IceBridge campaign leader Michael Studinger took the photo, and according to the Earth Observatory, the thin lines in the ice around the Bird are most likely trails from polar bears in the area.

http://www.livescience.com/46059-army-plane-wreck-greenland-photo.html