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JD Wood
The Girl on the Boat
Three murders. One witness. No bodies.
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When 26-year-old Sofie, recovering from her father’s recent suicide, learns from a journalist friend that he may have been the victim of a secret drug trial, she is desperate to uncover the truth. However, when they meet up with two pharma company whistleblowers on a Thames river boat, it all goes horribly wrong: her friend and the two men are shot and left for dead, and she narrowly escapes with her life.
Shockingly, they disappear, along with the evidence, and the police don’t believe her. As a witness, her life is now in grave danger, not least because the chairman of the company conducting the drugs trial, Cambridge Bio, is a leading politician.
Forced to try and solve the mystery on her own, Sofie goes on the run. But there’s someone else looking for her: ex-Special Forces Cal Harrison had been tasked by Cambridge with ‘protecting’ the whistleblowers, and he suspects he’s been set up.
When he starts to question their disappearance, he finds himself framed for their murder. His only hope of saving himself, and getting to the truth, is to find the girl on the boat…
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Book 1 in the Cal Harrison thriller series.
Don't Look Down
Fledgling investigative journalist Sofie James wakes up drugged and confused in a strange house. The last thing she remembers is passing out after someone tried to kill her, in a bid to silence her as a witness to murder.
Enter her rescuer Cal Harrison, ex-Special Forces, who realises that she is the key to exposing an illegal drug trial that implicates a major British politician. Tasked with bringing her in to be interviewed by the British security service, he persuades her to come with him to Paris, but before they can reach the safety of the British embassy, they narrowly escape a car bomb attack and arrest by the French police.
Fearing he has been betrayed and framed for crimes he did not commit, Cal is forced to debrief her on the run, forging new identities for them both in an effort to hide from authorities they can no longer trust. Their survival depends on Sofie gaining the confidence of a pharma company insider, and the ability of Cal to shake off their pursuers. When matters finally come to a terrifying climax in Gibraltar, there are just three words on a map that stand between them and their freedom…
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Book 2 in the Cal Harrison thriller series.
The Big Little War
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Based on newly discovered war diaries, this is the incredible story of how a handful of RAF trainees and their instructors fought overwhelming odds to save Britain’s Middle East empire - and why they were excised from history.
In early 1941 RAF Habbaniya in Iraq was a quiet flying school far from the front line. This all changed when, following a German supported Iraqi coup, 9000 Iraqi troops marched on the camp to demand its surrender. Habbaniya was virtually defenceless, with reinforcements weeks away across the desert. Left to fend for themselves and faced with the imminent arrival of the Luftwaffe, the camp commandant ordered a pre-emptive strike in their ancient biplanes…
Of all the battles of WW2, there has never been a more underreported campaign with such strategic significance. Had the school failed, Britain’s power in the Middle East would be crippled, the oil fields lost to the Germans, and the course of the war very different.
The Spare and the Heir
Ruritania, a small country in Eastern Europe, decides to resurrect its monarchy, with unpredictable results...
Newly independent Ruritania welcomes its first tourists. It doesn’t matter that the tour guide knows nothing about the place - nobody does, ever since a century earlier ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ had been criminally misindexed in the British Library under fiction.
It’s an exciting time to be going. There’s a new regime in power, young and idealistic, promoters of recycled fashion and universal veganism. They have booted the oligarchs out and elected an artist as president. However, there is a looming problem - ominous signs that Russia wants Ruritania back. So they come up with a plan to restore the monarchy, and the race is on to find the heir to the long-defunct throne.
Encouragingly, Rose Elphberg turns out to be more than a match for Kate, Meghan et al. But shockingly, it’s discovered that she is secretly engaged to an oligarch’s coke-snorting son. They urgently need an alternate heir.
Cue the tour guide. Christopher Wainwright…
To Burma and Back
The War Diaries of Colin Dunford Wood - 1939-46
A fascinating eyewitness account of some of the lesser-known episodes in World War Two, written by an Indian Army officer turned RAF pilot. Full of self-deprecating humour, Dunford Wood's war diaries record adventure, boredom, terror, love and more. Accompanied by photographs and maps, his adventures began on the North-West Frontier of British India in early 1939 and continued through operations in Iraq, Burma, China, Holland and Germany. Over this period he piloted over 100 aircraft types, including Audaxes, Lysanders, Hurricanes and Spitfires. He was one of 39 pupil pilots who fought at Habbaniya in May 1941; he was shot down by friendly fire in Burma in 1942; he flew the last Hurricane out in the face of the marauding Japanese, before returning to Burma as part of the Arakan campaign in 1943; and he flew Spitfires in support of the Allied crossing of the Rhine in 1945. Of 60 Indian Army officers who originally volunteered to transfer to the RAF when war broke out, he was one of just two survivors. It’s an incredible tale.