Bøger af Richard Whittle

It is 1985. Well respected lawyer David Fraser has been tipped as the next head of Britain's Security Service, MI5. Not only is David a man who deals in dark secrets, he has one of his own, a secret so damning that if it is uncovered it will destroy him. David's father dies. David has a hip injury from when he was young and he enlists his brother's help to clear the family house. What they find in the attic threatens to turn David's world on its head. In an attempt to conceal the truth from his brother he falls deeper and deeper into a tangle of deceit and lies that take him back to his teen years, to the time when his parents encouraged him to befriend Thomas Todd, a boy who had access to weapons. At first David is impressed. He soon realises that Todd can be unpredictable and violent. This novel is suitable for young adults upwards.

A fascinating and authoritative narrative history of the V-22 Osprey, revealing the inside story of the most controversial piece of military hardware ever developed for the United States Marine Corps.When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid “tiltrotor” called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their dream machine. The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane. Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival. By 2000, the Osprey was nine years late and billions over budget, bedeviled by technological hurdles, business rivalries, and an epic political battle over whether to build it at all. Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history. The Marines were eager to put it into service anyway. Then two crashes killed twenty-three Marines. They still refused to abandon the Osprey, even after the Corps’ own proud reputation was tarnished by a national scandal over accusations that a commander had ordered subordinates to lie about the aircraft’s problems. Based on in-depth research and hundreds of interviews, The Dream Machine recounts the Marines’ quarter-century struggle to get the Osprey into combat. Whittle takes the reader from the halls of the Pentagon and Congress to the war zone of Iraq, from the engineer’s drafting table to the cockpits of the civilian and Marine pilots who risked their lives flying the Osprey—and sometimes lost them. He reveals the methods, motives, and obsessions of those who designed, sold, bought, flew, and fought for the tiltrotor. These stories, including never before published eyewitness accounts of the crashes that made the Osprey notorious, not only chronicle an extraordinary chapter in Marine Corps history, but also provide a fascinating look at a machine that could still revolutionize air travel.

John races against time to discover the truth...and in doing so may unearth secrets that were better left buried...