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Posted on March 12, 2025March 12, 2025 by Mike

Apropos of not much, really, I just wanted to mention Tactical Hermit’s brief summation of the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo towards the end of WW2, both events the impetus of a great deal of Allied angst and self-recrimination even today. Doubtless historians, scholars, and pundits will be arguing the same unanswerable questions from now until Doomsday: Were the bombings ineffectual, perhaps even pointless and unnecessary? Can we ever truly know if they hastened the final collapse of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan by so much as a single minute? Should they be thought of as simply part and parcel of modern warfare, albeit profoundly regrettable? Or were they in fact atrocities, crimes against humanity perpetrated by unfeeling monsters against blameless civilians?

The reason I bring all this up tonight is nothing so weighty as all that, thank merciful Heaven. See, it just so happens that, thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, I have on my sail foam a seriously gripping historical-fiction novel in ePub format titled The Air Raid Killer (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 1). It’s one hell of a page-turner, as author Frank Goldammer’s Detective Heller doggedly pursues a mad, quasi-human serial killer through the dead, burned-out streets of once-beautiful Dresden just before, during, and after the city’s immolation and utter destruction by several thousand RAF/USAAF HE and incendiary bombs.

Steve Anderson’s translation is absolutely flawless—not often the case with ePubs, alas. In the usual run of things, the editing and/or conversion from dead tree to ePub is so godawful it can be an active nuisance, yanking you right up out of the story by your ears to leave you staring blankly at the nearest wall. You can but shake your head in sorrow, anger, and confusion, hoping against hope that whoever committed this heinous crime against lit’ratchure wasn’t getting paid for the job. Oughta be in jail, more like.

Didn’t realize it until just now, but there’s a sequel to ARK. Yclept A Thousand Devils, Book 2 features Max Heller plying his trade in the same locality two (2) years after his hometown’s nightmarish destruction. Gonna have to add that ‘un to the ol’ KU library toot sweet and give it a look-see, soonest.

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