An Act of God – Stephen Francis

My Recommendation 4/5

Following the end of the Second World War under Operation Paperclip the United States of America brought over 1,500 German Scientists (along with their family members), who worked for the Nazis, to utilise their expertise and know how.  

This story is a second outing for Daniel Miller, a British man living in Washington, by Stephen Francis and deals with circumstances 8 years after the end of the Second World War.  Someone is killing a number of the German Scientists.

Daniel Miller, who has extensive experience of working behind enemy lines, is asked by the FBI to investigate who is behind the killings. What follows is a satisfying and well plotted trail of Miller unravelling a scheme that involves a number of layers.  The violence is never gratuitous and the atmosphere created evokes the post war era and the need for personal contact and old school spying techniques.

Needless to say certain forces are not enamoured with Miller’s efforts and their attempts to stop him have ramifications for those close to him.    
 
Reading this the book raised numerous questions about post war America and the impending Cold War with the Soviets.

This is a satisfying read and worthy of your time. I thoroughly enjoyed the ending and there is a marked change of pace towards the end of the novel that found me increasing the speed of reading as I was keen to reach the enjoyable conclusion.

Thank you Net Galley for an ARC. 

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Saturday 14th December 2019

Sometimes things happen for a reason. Sometimes things grow, sometimes they shrivel and die.

It is time to take action

https://greenworld.org.uk/article/we-must-adapt-climate-decline?fbclid=IwAR3Q8EANgvnsROHxf4odc4GdgiKvkblyY6-6AgOhRONxKr6Is3N15qNQg9E

Friday 13th December 2019

The exit poll was broadly correct.

Made up statistic 50,000 more is actually 31,000 more (19,000 + 31,000)

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-general-election-2019-what-boris-johnsons-victory-means-for-brexit/

Hitchhiking Ghosts …

Janine's Blog

This is another true story.

Unfortunately, I am unable to verify any of the details as my amazing granddad sadly passed away along time ago.

But this is a tale he told me when I was in my teens that scared the bejesus out of me …

It takes place sometime during the mid-90’s.

He and my grandma were on holiday, somewhere in Northern Ireland, where she was born.

They had been to some-sort of family get-together and were travelling back to where they were staying. It was early evening time.

They were driving fairly slowly down a country road, when suddenly they see a hitch-hiker in front of them. As memory serves, and I have no-one to substantiate this, it was an old woman. For whatever reason, maybe as they were street-smart Londoner’s who know picking up a hitcher equals being murdered, they chose not to stop for this…

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The Manor House

Janine's Blog

Sometimes the scariest stories don’t have to be the most shocking, or violent or contain lots of elaborate details. Sometimes the scariest stories, just have to be true.

I was about 8 or 9 when my dad told me this account, so it was the late 80’s.

We lived in Yeovil in Somerset, and he was a bricklayer for a well-known construction company, Bartletts.

At the time, he was working on some renovations of an extremely old building called the old Abbey Manor Farm House. This was originally built somewhere around 1420, so as you can imagine, it had seen a lot of history and there was often an eerie feeling inside the manor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Farm_House,_Yeovil#/media/File:Abbey_Manor_Yeovil.jpg

One day, a friend of his had been working on his own in one of the bedrooms doing some renovation brickwork in one of the chimneys. My dad was on-site too, but working downstairs.

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