Spitfire pilot Ross Smith Stagg was one of 33 Allied airmen to defend Darwin against Japanese invasion on May 2, 1943. As one of 14 pilots shot down or experience mechanical failure in the ensuing battle, he parachuted into the sea 18 km from land, 100 km southwest of Darwin in the Fogg Bay area. He reached the shore in a dinghy. For the next 15 days he trudged through inhospitable country in a futile attempt to return to Strauss airbase. What should have been a few days walk turned into his worst possible nightmare as he stumbled aimlessly through mosquito and crocodile infested swamps. "It was almost six days I'd been without sleep, apart from a short period of unconsciousness and those few moments before I fell out of that tree," he said. " I became demented by the cavalcade of mosquitoes and hallucinating badly". His experience was only to worsen - he waded halfway across a tidal river to be confronted by a large saltie. Darwin historian John Haslett help Stagg map the original route by retracing his steps, even managing to relocate an American Kittyhawk Stagg found crashed in the middle of nowhere.

Maxwell Smythe Brown IV is a smart-ass by design. To counter the ridicule his fancy name attracted, Brown the child became the point person in pranks, taunts, and mischief that kept him in hot water with teachers, principals, clerics and coaches. As he grew older, he added irreverence to mischievousness and his circle of victims and antagonists expanded to include military commanders, bosses and colleagues. When his clever speech and picaresque ways help him win the hand of a stunningly beautiful woman, it goes wrong; she’s dismally unsuited for marriage and makes his life miserable. There are occasional bright spots: his disregard for authority and convention helps him survive the Vietnam war. But his inability to keep his mouth shut and his fly zipped costs him his university sinecure and he’s exiled to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Three hundred years earlier the great Moghul Khan Shaista abruptly abandoned his post in the same city. The Khan’s youngest and favorite daughter had succumbed to disease and the grief stricken Khan fled the country, but not – it is believed – before burying a treasure as a memorial to her short life.For three centuries fortune hunters have searched for the rumored treasure but Brown has an advantage. As an accessory to a pretentious name he’s taken on a pretentious hobby: collecting antiquarian maps. Initially unaware of the importance of the information on one of his old maps, Brown sets in motion events that bring him closer to the treasure, but also attract the competitive attention of six brutal castoffs of an Indian intelligence service. Before the dust settles, two men have been beheaded, another skinned, a bystander strangled and two more fatally shot. With wit and irreverence, the book chronicles the journey of a man whose outward self-assurance and brashness mask wavering self-regard. As Brown acknowledges, it’s a full time job keeping up appearances. But he’s not without depth. A continuing theme is his quest for the true nature of a compassionate God who, paradoxically, presides over a universe of undeniable evil.Throughout, Professor Brown is our acerbic guide to: an unholy war, college campuses in the 70’s, a university exhibiting signs of tenure-induced rigor mortis, a Thai brothel, the watering holes of Europe, and life in the bottom-most percentile of the third world. This edition (Cutting to the Chase) is an abridged version of the original book. Several readers said they would like to move more rapidly through the character development sections to the fast-paced thriller when Max takes up the treasure hunt in earnest (and the corpses stack up). Out of respect for that feedback, the novel was extensively revised to provide this – a more conventional – thriller.

Between July and October 1940, in what became known as the Battle of Britain, a nation held its breath while the pilots of the Royal Air Force battled Hitler's Luftwaffe in the skies above England. A huge number of airmen lost their lives in this hard-fought episode and in the four years of air campaigns that followed, and those who survived faced terrifying risks; as Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few'. In this beautifully illustrated tribute to 'The Few', Bill Howard catalogues the objects which were essential to every wartime pilot, from the superstitious good-luck charm to the parachute on which his life might have depended and a wealth of other poignant items relating to his day-to-day existence during the air war against the Nazis.

In the early hours of January 4th 1944 a Wellington bomber of the RAF crashed in Brockhurst Wood near the village of Farnham Common. Of the crew of six only one survived. After the war the people of the village clubbed together for a memorial and installed a stained glass window in the Anglican Church of St. John's nearby. Forty years later Mrs. Florence Payne, mother of the dead rear-gunner, Sergeant Victor Payne, returned on a pilgrimage, revisiting the site and the church. The local newspaper covered the visit in a moving story and raised questions in the mind of local resident, ex RAF Bomber Command pilot, Jeff Gray. The newspaper indicated that the bomber was crippled and the young airmen died trying to avoid the village. What dreadful combination of circumstance had conspired against them? Captain Gray investigates…