Will o'the Glen on Books

It is a rare and beautiful thing to find a non-fiction book that reels you in by appealing to multiple subjects of interest, and In The Waves , by Rachel Lance, was just such a book for me. The subtitle – My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine – and the back cover blurb, “How a determined scientist cracked the case of the first successful—and disastrous—submarine attack” were clues to how well this book would line up with subjects that intrigue me. As a mechanical engineer by training and profession, anything to do with scientific and engineering investigations is of interest to me. With a career in the U. S. defense industry, and specifically submarines, that started in the Reagan era, coupled with a general interest in military history, the story of the Confederate submarine HL Hunley which lies at the heart of this book certainly piqued my interest. The Hunley , which famously sank the U.S. Navy blockade ship Housatonic with a black powder “torpedo” in February ...

“The King’s Justice” is the ninth novel from author Susan Elia MacNeal to feature the flame-haired, British-born, America-raised protagonist Maggie Hope. I read this book without having read any of the previous eight in the series, and while I am always wary of jumping in on a long-running series late in the game, MacNeal keeps newcomers like myself in the picture with a judicious amount of back story, but not so much as to bore continuing readers with details that they already know. It’s March 1943, and London has survived the aerial Battle of Britain and the bombing campaign of the Blitz. “The King’s Justice” finds Maggie working with a bomb-disposal unit in London after earlier adventures with the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and time spent supporting the Metropolitan Police in apprehending a notorious sequential murderer (or serial killer, as we call them in the USA) known as the “Blackout Beast”. While the “Beast” sits in jail, a new killer has begun to stalk t...