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JD Wood
The Girl on the Boat
Three murders. One witness. No bodies.
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When 26-year-old Sofie, recovering from her father’s recent suicide, learns from a journalist friend that he may have been the victim of a secret drug trial, she is desperate to uncover the truth. However, when they meet up with two pharma company whistleblowers on a Thames river boat, it all goes horribly wrong: her friend and the two men are shot and left for dead, and she narrowly escapes with her life.
Shockingly, they disappear, along with the evidence, and the police don’t believe her. As a witness, her life is now in grave danger, not least because the chairman of the company conducting the drugs trial, Cambridge Bio, is a leading politician.
Forced to try and solve the mystery on her own, Sofie goes on the run. But there’s someone else looking for her: ex-Special Forces Cal Harrison had been tasked by Cambridge with ‘protecting’ the whistleblowers, and he suspects he’s been set up.
When he starts to question their disappearance, he finds himself framed for their murder. His only hope of saving himself, and getting to the truth, is to find the girl on the boat…
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Book 1 in the Cal Harrison thriller series.
Hunted
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When the hunter becomes the hunted…
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In 2007 an Afghan warlord, his wife and daughter are gunned down on a Kandahar rooftop by a small team of UK Special Forces. Sergeant Cal Harrison was the one who found the sole survivor - a twelve-year-old boy - and he’s suffered nightmares for it ever since. Now the boy, Hassan Mansour, has grown up, and has arrived in Britain to seek revenge, with a breathtakingly ambitious strike aimed at the heart of the British state.
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Codenamed Foxtrot, Mansour has assembled a team of sympathisers, including an embittered Iraqi refugee called Mo and the beautiful Samira, a Syrian exile studying journalism at the LSE. Her role is to seduce a government advisor and gather intelligence on the imminent State Opening of Parliament. However, despite her support for the cause, Samira becomes increasingly fearful about what Mansour is planning, as a seemingly random series of murders of veterans takes place across the country. Random, that is, until Cal joins the dots, and unwittingly puts his own family in danger…
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In a shocking double climax, Samira and Cal confront their demons in a bid to save the people they love.
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Book 2 in the Cal Harrison thriller series.
The Cardinal's Sin
A murder in the Vatican. A trail of deceit.
Journalist Sofie James is tipped off that a priest working in the Vatican has a highly sensitive document to share. Something so explosive, that it will point to foreign state blackmail at the highest levels of the Catholic Church.
But before she can get to the second of two meetings, the priest is murdered, and Sofie is left with just one half of a tantalising puzzle.
Calling on the help of former collaborator and security consultant Cal Harrison, Sofie’s investigation takes her on a trail which leads to a corrupt Bishop in the southern United States; a Chinese-financed bible publisher on a small Caribbean island; and a Cardinal at the heart of the Vatican: ‘Il Sostituto’, the Pope’s Chief of Staff.
Book 3 in the Cal Harrison thriller series, coming June 2025.
The Big Little War
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Based on newly discovered war diaries, this is the incredible story of how a handful of RAF trainees and their instructors fought overwhelming odds to save Britain’s Middle East empire - and why they were excised from history.
In early 1941 RAF Habbaniya in Iraq was a quiet flying school far from the front line. This all changed when, following a German supported Iraqi coup, 9000 Iraqi troops marched on the camp to demand its surrender. Habbaniya was virtually defenceless, with reinforcements weeks away across the desert. Left to fend for themselves and faced with the imminent arrival of the Luftwaffe, the camp commandant ordered a pre-emptive strike in their ancient biplanes…
Of all the battles of WW2, there has never been a more underreported campaign with such strategic significance. Had the school failed, Britain’s power in the Middle East would be crippled, the oil fields lost to the Germans, and the course of the war very different.
The Spare and the Heir
Ruritania, a small country in Eastern Europe, decides to resurrect its monarchy, with unpredictable results...
Newly independent Ruritania welcomes its first tourists. It doesn’t matter that the tour guide knows nothing about the place - nobody does, ever since a century earlier ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ had been criminally misindexed in the British Library under fiction.
It’s an exciting time to be going. There’s a new regime in power, young and idealistic, promoters of recycled fashion and universal veganism. They have booted the oligarchs out and elected an artist as president. However, there is a looming problem - ominous signs that Russia wants Ruritania back. So they come up with a plan to restore the monarchy, and the race is on to find the heir to the long-defunct throne.
Encouragingly, Rose Elphberg turns out to be more than a match for Kate, Meghan et al. But shockingly, it’s discovered that she is secretly engaged to an oligarch’s coke-snorting son. They urgently need an alternate heir.
Cue the tour guide. Christopher Wainwright…
To Burma and Back
The War Diaries of Colin Dunford Wood - 1939-46
A fascinating eyewitness account of some of the lesser-known episodes in World War Two, written by an Indian Army officer turned RAF pilot. Full of self-deprecating humour, Dunford Wood's war diaries record adventure, boredom, terror, love and more. Accompanied by photographs and maps, his adventures began on the North-West Frontier of British India in early 1939 and continued through operations in Iraq, Burma, China, Holland and Germany. Over this period he piloted over 100 aircraft types, including Audaxes, Lysanders, Hurricanes and Spitfires. He was one of 39 pupil pilots who fought at Habbaniya in May 1941; he was shot down by friendly fire in Burma in 1942; he flew the last Hurricane out in the face of the marauding Japanese, before returning to Burma as part of the Arakan campaign in 1943; and he flew Spitfires in support of the Allied crossing of the Rhine in 1945. Of 60 Indian Army officers who originally volunteered to transfer to the RAF when war broke out, he was one of just two survivors. It’s an incredible tale.