Waikato Times
Australian unleashes a rip-snorter
By JUNE JOYCE - Saturday, 23 June 2007
Tony Park, (Pan Macmillan, $35)

It's always a pleasure to read an author for the first time, and realise you will read everything else he has written. If you like action adventures, with a spy theme, some education - either travel or technological - and a little romance, then this guy's for real. His first two novels were Far Horizon and Zambezi. He's an Australian who loves Africa , visiting it every year, and that love certainly shows in his descriptions of the countryside, scenery and the people.

The story is set during World War II in Rhodesia , now Zimbabwe , at a Royal Air Force (RAF) training camp. The idea was to let the pilots learn how to fly in skies empty of Nazi war planes. Then two aircraft are damaged or crash, a pilot is killed after he bails out, and an attractive RAF parachute trainer is murdered.

Then a Nazi starts trekking over desert and scrub towards the base. Those are starting blocks of mystery and menace for a rip-snorting romp that keeps you guessing at all levels. What puts this into the top echelon of the genre is that the people, even the heroes, are fallible human beings. We see them develop and change.

Some are revealed for the dreadful human beings they are, but most are just, well, people. It's impossible to avoid politics, given the novel's setting. This was during British colonial rule, when independence was not yet an issue, at least to the colonists.

From hindsight of 60 years we see gentle, sad irony in aspirations of that time. Park does not run from it. He shows racism, and he also shows the lack of it. The net result is that somehow, without him actually saying so, you get the feeling that Park sees beyond the present problems into a better future, because societies, like people, grow and develop.

June Joyce is a Hamilton journalist and reviewer.