Product Description

In 1964, a young Australian girl, Linda Carr, is trying to track down the wreckage of the Liberator bomber in which her father died when it crashed in northern Italy in 1944 during World War Two. She employs the help of motorcycle TT racer Jack Kirby, a man who has his own inner demons to combat. He was a Mosquito fighter pilot during the war and experienced at first hand the astonishing courage of the Italian partisans in the face of Nazi brutality. Jack is keen to find one of the partisans, a woman with a past as dark as the secrets she still holds close to her heart. What Jack and Linda discover in their journey deep into an uncharted Italian mountain region is more dangerous and life-changing than they could ever have imagined.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #303331 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Rob Ryan was born in Liverpool. He has written for The Face, Arena, Conde Nast Traveller, Esquire, GQ Magazine and The Sunday Times. He lives in North London with his wife and three children.

Customer Reviews

After Midnight
For those familiar with Robert Ryan's blend of authenticity, history and cliff-hanging drama this will be a rapid change into overdrive. All the solid components that come from an author who knows his facts combined with a twisting story blending past and present, in the first and third persons. Spellbinding - bring on the next please !

Superb story telling
Perhaps this one strays much further into fiction than its predecessors but that does not detract from the enjoyment of a good story, well told. One of Ryan's greatest skills is that of detail, his accuracy is simply outstanding. In this story we have an RAF Mosquito pilot who crash lands into an Italian lake during the German occupation of 1944 who is rescued, then seconded by the local resistance fighters. In 1964 he is still in Italy running his own, one aircraft airline, when he is approached by a young woman seeking the undiscovered remains of her late father's Liberator bomber lost around the same time as his ditching. The pertinent detail of just those three aircraft and their operation is faultless. As is the revelation that the main character, Jack Kirby, was a former Isle of Man TT racer (still today the most dangerous motor sport event in the world) and again the accuracy and credibility is quite remarkable; and there's much more, a superbly engaging piece of work.

Gripping read!
Possibly the best of Ryan's books to date and based upon a true story. It was a rather odd experience to read an article in the paper about an Australian girl searching for her father's crashed aircraft around the Italian lakes and to read a letter sent by him, to her, the daughter he had neer met on the occasion of her first birthday form the other side of the world. The article caused me to cross reference with the novel, and indeed, the letter along with its real life origins is printed at the beginning of the book and is the basis for the novel. It is not strictly a flying novel and it does skip back an to from present day to the War. a practice which normally irritates me intensely, but, strangely no so in this case! A truly fabulous story about a part of WW2 which is not much talked about and based on a true and rather chilling letter. Read it, you will not regret it!