Buried Pasts [Kindle Edition]

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW: 'This page-turner blends suspense with a cast of characters who genuinely care for each other. It’s an engaging and satisfying novel for fans of adventure stories with a heart.'

www.georgestratford.com

Personal demons can be a killer

Even after eighteen years, Canadian pilot Mike Stafford still carries a powerful sense of guilt over the death of his best friend during a huge RAF bombing raid to Berlin in 1944. He eventually returns to England for an inaugural squadron reunion full of apprehension over what the visit may produce.


Siggi Hoffman, then a young German girl of twenty, also has terrible memories of a personal loss from that same wartime night. She too is unable to forget. Nor has she ever been able to forgive.

When fate throws these two together in a small north Yorkshire town during the summer of 1962, the past collides devastatingly into the present. And all the time, lurking ominously in the background, is an unknown enemy intent on extracting violent revenge. Personal demons are only one of the many problems that must now be overcome when Stafford and Siggi find themselves fighting to survive.

As long buried secrets are finally revealed, events reach a literally explosive conclusion.

I was born prematurely (feet first, all two and a half pounds of me) in Croydon, South London during early June 1944 - just four days before Hitler's V1 flying doodlebug bombs began raining down all around our neighbourhood. Years later my mother told me the story of how our house (with us inside) had one almost miraculous escape from these bombs. Maybe there's a novel somewhere in this for me? It's a strong possibility. My father was a Canadian bomber pilot serving with 78 Squadron RAF Bomber Command. He was killed in action on his 28th mission when I was six weeks old. Before I was born, my mother was also very involved in the war effort, serving as a WAAF at the top secret Bletchley Park establishment where the famous German Enigma code was eventually broken. My first published novel, IN THE LONG RUN, had as its backdrop South Africa's real life event Comrades Marathon - 55 miles of torture run over massive hills, most years in considerable heat and humidity. This was selling spectacularly well for a first novel until my publishers went bust virtually overnight, so not a single penny of royalties ever found its way into my pocket. I later re-published the title with Booksurge, now Create Space. The book features a foreword written by BBC broadcaster and former Olympic athlete, Steve Cram. Steve, whose world record time for the mile stood for over eight years, also provided a jacket quote stating, "A gripping tale from start to finish." That's Steve with me in the second picture, taken at the launch party of the original version of IN THE LONG RUN in March 2000. This was held at the London HQ of advertising giants Saatchi & Saatchi, where I was working at the time as a copywriter. How the heck did I ever manage to get myself such a job in Don Draper land at 51 years old when only three years previously I had been a long-term unemployed bum with absolutely no educational qualifications to my name? That's another story altogether. One that I've just finished writing in a bio called AIN'T FINISHED YET. I can indeed identify with many aspects of the fabulous TV series Mad Men, although sadly from a personal point of view, with very little of the gratuitous sex and huge salaries involved.