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These 3 books Blue Man Falling, Band of Eagles and To Play the Fox form a trilogy (so far) by author Frank Barnard. They are fictional and follow his characters Ossie Wolf and Kit Curtis. The books are set during World War 2. Ossie is an American pilot in the RAF. He belonged to a rich family in USA and travelled to Spain to fight as a flyer for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. After the bombing of Guernica he changed sides and fly for the Republic until they lost. He escaped to England and joined the RAF. He is portrayed as a hard bitten killer determined to defeat fascism. Kit Curtis is a middle class Englishman with a conscience.

Blue Man Falling introduces the main characters and a group of others and is set during the "Phony War" and through the Fall of France. Band of Eagles is set in 1941 and follows our heroes through the Italian and German attacks on Malta. In the 3rd book To Play the Fox the heroes find themselves fighting in North Africa. Kit Curtis is full of angst about killing and has now joined a photographic unit flying an unarmed Spitfire; and Ossie Wolf is determined to destroy more of the enemy by being seconded as a flyer to a secret Guerrilla type force, where he pilots a Storch dressed in German uniform. None of the plot lines are resolved by the end of the 3rd novel, leaving the novelist with the opportunity to continue the tale into (at least) a 4th novel.

I found the air combat sequences described in the books to be tense, exciting and well described. However I think the main characters are quite caricatured and it was easy to see that they were being deliberately constructed to be opposites to each other in so many ways. This didn't always add to the tension, quite often it just resulted in me thinking "here we go again". Most of the other characters in the books were quite 2 dimensional too, none of them were really well drawn IMHO. Plot lines were likewise either predictable or fantastical - especially in To Play the Fox, which at times I found quite ridiculous - rather like a "Boys Own Adventure" type of story. On the civilian "front" subplot, there are also a couple of unresolved murders that I am sure the main characters will also get around to solving, when they have a bit more time to do so.

I bought Blue Man Falling first and though it was ok, I did not enjoy it that much. Unfortunately I bought Band of Eagles before I read Blue Man Falling, else I probably would not have bothered. I picked up To Play the Fox from a remainder shop for a couple of bucks just as I finished reading Band of Eagles. I did find Band of Eagles to be the best read of the 3, To Play the Fox was, I thought, definitely the worst of the 3. The author certainly knows about his planes, flying and the stuff that happens on airfields. His writing suffers in dealing with his creation and interplay of characters, both major and minor. Personally I won't bother reading any more of Barnard's books from this series that may be released in the future.

(Please excuse the different sized book covers, I just downloaded copies of the covers from the internet, then found them to be different sizes. And I could not be bothered trying to work out how to resize them once uploaded...)