THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4), interwar Bonding

THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4)
WILLIAM FERNIE
Fernie Publishing Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Before the Luftwaffe terrorised Europe, it was forged in secrecy.

In the uneasy peace before WWII, Captain Tom Munro is flying for Deutsche Luft Hansa when he uncovers a clandestine military airfield hidden deep within Soviet Russia.

Coerced into supporting Germany's secret rearmament programme, he risks his life flying experimental aircraft and developing new, untested operational techniques all prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles. This test flying provides a unique opportunity to gather military intelligence of immense value to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

But Tom knows that he will not be allowed to survive with this vital intelligence and must attempt the impossible: escape with Germany's secrets before he disappears forever.

An interwar aviation/espionage thriller for readers of David Downing, Philip Kerr and Robert Harris.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tom Munro is a very enjoyable PoV to follow as this based-on-facts thriller of Nazi Germany's preparations for war in the air. The prior three volumes in the series deal with the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles era, and now the period that enables the rise of the Nazi state.

It's a period I'm very interested in, and one that saw gigantic advances inn aeronautical engineering, materials science, and other sciences that are useful in wartime. As always it's the horrors of slaughter that drive change, and the economy's growth, and the terrible Othering of people in no way wrong, bad, or evil as the scum at the top try to justify the war "They" want by manufacturing enemies within and without.

What makes Tom fun to follow is mostly his test-pilot nous. It's fun for me to read about the planes realy being tested, really being studied in this pre-Depression time that has so much hope for a peaceful future that recedes and recedes while Tom and his ilk try to keep it alive. Yet here he is flying violation-of-treaty equipment to a secret base! One in Russia, no less...more serious skulduggery...and consequences for Tom in terms of using spycraft for...good?

Come for the history, stay for the gearhead talk, which you'll need to be getting along with that to be in the full story. I was captivated, you might not be, so be aware the jargon is plentiful and needed to make sense of the Lipetsk Russian airfield subplot. There are many politicosocial developments but they almost all incorporate technology and discussion of same.

There is yearning for his lost, belovèd fellow spy Alice, which is getting a bit wearing if I'm honest. Oh well. One must have a woman in a thriller, she motivates the main man. *sigh*

A complex and very very sensitive matter, Germany's resurgent ambitions and rebounding desire to lead the technological world, and the worries of her very recent opponents all buried in piles of dead people from that stupid war. And an ending to this story that's exactly right. All designed to give this old man reader the happy.

Be ready for the complexities on multiple fronts and it might do the same trick for you.