Victory » (~)

Veteran naval aviator Stephen Coonts shook up the action-adventure game with his 1986 bestseller, Flight of the Intruder. He followed that dazzling debut with a string of adventures starring intrepid hero Jake Grafton -- a series that only gets more popular with each new release.

This exciting volume features new short novels by:

Stephen Coonts Ralph Peters Harold Coyle Harold Robbins R. J. Pineiro David Hagberg Jim DeDelice James Cobb Barrett Tillman Dean Ing

A stirring tribute to the Greatest Generation of Americans, Victory brings together the finest military fiction writers in the world with short novels of courage, skill, daring, and sacrifice. Here you will meet the men and women who fought and won World War II and truly made the world safe for democracy, in thrilling stories of war as it was really fought.

An exciting sequel to Stephen Coonts’s bestselling Combat, Victory brings together today’s greatest military, espionage, and technothriller writers in all-original thrilling tales of World War II—great short novels that range from the home front to the battlefields of Europe to the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Join Stephen Coonts, Ralph Peters, Harold Coyle, Harold Robbins, R. J. Pineiro, David Hagberg, Jim DeFelice, James Cobb, Barrett Tillman, and Dean Ing in a book filled with nonstop action and adventure.

Stephen Coonts asks what happens when you load a Catalina flying boat with five tons of bombs, a half-dozen machine guns, and a crew that walks a fine line between valor and suicide. In the Pacific theater of war, the Japanese Navy is about to discover the answer to that question.

Ralph Peters follows a German officer in the starving days after World War II as he makes his way on foot back home, where a defeat more terrible than the Allied victory awaits him.

Harold Coyle takes us to the fierce fighting in the Pacific where the Japanese and the Americans clash over a strategic airfield on the island of Guadalcanal. Their battlefield will earn the nickname Bloody Ridge for both sides . . .

Harold Robbins goes back to a time before the war was fought—when a doctor is brought in to diagnose a very special patient, one whose survival could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Now caught between his ethics and his humanity, he must make a choice with the fate of the world at stake.

R. J. Pineiro brings the Eastern Front to light as a young American pilot is ordered to train Russian pilots in the new American made P-39D Aircobras during the final months of the brutal battle of in during the winter of 1942.

David Hagberg sends the OSS and MI6 behind enemy lines in Germany to stop the one weapon that can win the war for Hitler and Nazi Germany, an electromechanical guidance system that can launch missiles not only across countries, but across the ocean and hit the United States.

Jim DeFelice takes us to the height of the war when information was bought dearly on both sides. When an American pilot parachutes into Germany to gather information, he lands right in the middle of the viper’s nest—a place more deadly than anything he could have found in the skies above.

James Cobb sends a special detail of PBY Catalina flying boats hunting for a hidden enemy radar station that provides the Japanese Navy with an edge in the war for the Pacific.

Barrett Tillman brings us into a gruesome fight as a Marine Corps flamethrower unit fights Japanese defenders on Tarawa Atoll in November 1943.

Dean Ing takes into the world of espionage as the Army Air Force becomes convinced that a Nazi superweapon can reach New York and Washington. As an interceptor is rush developed, a plane-crazy young Texan begins to suspect that someone on the team has an agenda all his own. . . .

Here they are: ten bestselling military, espionage, and technothriller authors paying tribute to the Greatest Generation of Americans.

Publishers Weekly

This hefty, thoroughly absorbing anthology, a companion to Coonts's Combat, gathers novellas about WWII from 10 leading thriller and military fiction writers. Some are character driven, like "Blood Bond" by the late Harold Robbins, about an American Jew working undercover as an SS officer, and Ralph Peters's "Honor," about the reflections of a German officer after defeat, as he makes his way home on foot through American- and British-occupied territory. Other entries make technology the major player. Coonts's "The Sea Witch" and James Cobb's "Eyes of the Cat" romanticize the PBY Catalina, a lumbering, graceless plane that was not state of the art even back in 1942, but was versatile and rugged. An American pilot parachutes into Nazi-occupied France and makes off with a Messerschmitt jet fighter in Jim DeFelice's "Wolf Flight." David Hagberg's intricately plotted "V5" explores the German rocket program and anthrax research as it weaves together the stories of Brits and Americans working undercover in Berlin: Benjamin Steinberg, a German Jewish machinist who's spying for the allies; an American pilot working for MI6; a young woman spy who's seducing a German general; and her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, is also on a secret intelligence mission in Berlin. WWII buffs and military fiction fans will have a long and luxurious feast. (May 6) Forecast: Coonts has seized on a previously hard-to-sell format-the novella-and turned it into something profitable. Expect this volume to follow up on the successes of Combat. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.