Love, Freedom or Death
This is an adventure story and a love story set on Crete during WW2. New Zealand soldier Dudley Watkins, known as “Kiwi”, escaped from Crete after the German invasion in 1941, but made a promise to return to Eleni, a girl he hardly knew and believes now to be dead.
Two years later Kiwi gets the chance to fulfil his promise and gain revenge, returning to Crete to aid the resistance against the Germans. Propelled into a position of leadership, he finds himself surrounded by conflict, against the occupying Germans, with his own British command in Egypt and between the rival Cretan resistance factions. At the same time Kiwi must face his own inner conflict, as he discovers that Eleni is still alive, but unattainable, married to another man. A man that Kiwi must now work with in order to unite the resistance factions and overcome the Germans.
I enjoyed this book, the action rolls along at a reasonable pace with a couple of plot twists towards the end. The combat scenes are mostly well handled, if a little confused at times. My only minor gripe is that some sections of the novel do seem more like a film script, with long passages of dialogue and little descriptive writing.
