Ever heard of Bear Grylls? I truly hope so, because this former soldier in the British Special Forces, the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos is also an adventurer, writer and television presenter. His Facebook bio says that “Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure.”
I first heard about Bear Grylls seven years ago when I was on my vacation visiting my friends in Sweden and we watched his Ultimate Survival (also known as Born Survivor/Man vs. Wild) on the Discovery Channel. Needless to say that Bear Grylls captured my attention on the spot, that I wanted to see more of him, making me check for him online immediately after returning home to Croatia.
I loved the concept of his show in which he was left stranded with his crew in an unfamiliar wilderness – rainforests, glaciers, deserts, islands, to name just a few – with only one goal: to survive and find his way back to civilization.
The similar pattern follows his entertaining and exciting thriller Ghost Flight. Packed with action, adventure, beautiful landscapes of the remote Amazon jungle where lies hidden a mysterious WWII warplane, Ghost Flight guarantees to keep even the most demanding fans of this genre glued to its pages. It is so easy to picture Bear Grylls, an ex-soldier and a survivor, as an ex-soldier Will Jaeger, also a leader of a team of former elite warriors in their quest to uncover the mystery of the hidden warplane and the secret of Nazi evil forces (Wir sind die Zukunft) that lie buried in it.
I am a sucker for WWII novels and I am a sucker for Amazon rainforest. When those two are combined, you have an explosive reading before you. You are drinking up a cocktail made of ghosts from not so recent past, to majority of people almost forgotten, but the ghosts which are patiently waiting for their moment of the rise of the new Reich, and a pristine nature beaming with both beautiful and deadly life.
Ghost Flight is a successful debut novel with interesting and well-developed characters, full of action, twists and turns and gripping moments. It is also a very detailed novel which probably might not help us in a fight against the rise of a new Reich if it comes to it, but it could very well serve us as a survival guide in a primeval rainforest if we ever find ourselves in our personal mission under the canopy of magnificent trees where neither evil Nazis nor modern-day humans got to leave their destructive imprint.
Bernard Jan
www.bernardjan.com
Book cover source: Goodreads