The Blitz Detective--Book Review by Shirley Raye Redmond

I love mysteries! I once named a dog after Lord Peter Wimsey and a pet canary after Brother Cadfael. And now I’ve discovered a new detective series that I’ve been enjoying very much. John Jago is the Blitz detective, a 42 –year-old bachelor who fought in the great war and now fights crime at home in London during WWII. Direct Hit and Fifth Column are the first two titles in the series.

In each novel, the author Mike Hollow creates a believable community trimmed with all the accurate historic details such as bomb shelters and children being evacuated to the countryside and women carrying gas masks to the corner grocery store when they go shopping. For fans of the PBS series Foyle’s War, here’s something you’ll enjoy sinking your teeth into.

Detective Jago must solve murders and other crimes, tasks frequently complicated when German bombs obliterate all evidence or seemingly respectable witnesses turn out to be traitors and spies. I am eagerly looking forward to the release of the next novel in the series, Enemy Action, in which Jago must solve the puzzle of a pacifist school teacher found stabbed to death in a public air raid shelter—a task complicated by the fact that the teacher owned a gun.

When asked why he set his detective novels in London during the Blitz, Hollow responded, “the Blitz turned everyday existences into a life-and-death struggle for ordinary people—and some of them were my family.”

The novels are published by Lion Fiction, an imprint of Lion Hudson, a company offering Christian fiction of a different sort, “aiming to reach both religious and secular readers by relying on narrative thrust, believable characters, and boundary-crossing context to create an imaginative awareness of spiritual truths without battering-ram preachment.”

Happy reading!

An award-winning writer and frequent conference speaker, Shirley Raye Redmond is the author of three inspirational novels, PRUDENCE PURSUED, VIPER’S NEST, and AMANDA’S BEAU, as well as two dozen children’s books, including LEWIS & CLARK: A PRAIRIE DOG FOR THE PRESIDENT (Random House), which was a Children’s Book of the Month Club selection. Shirley Raye holds an M.A. in literature and teaches through the Institute of Children’s Literature. She has been married to her husband Bill for over forty years. They live in New Mexico and are blessed with two grown children and three adorable grandchildren. Touch bases at shirleyrayeredmond.com or Facebook.

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