The Far Reaches

After being wounded at the bloody battle of Tarawa in 1943, Captain Josh Thurlow is shanghaied by a determined Irish nun into a private war of her own with a crazed Japanese commander. Struggling to get back to the "real war," he finds himself in a different kind of battle, one he could never have imagined back home. Mark Deakins's narration pulses with all the excitement and tension of a war story that alternates between the war's viciousness and the complex human dramas it creates. Without slipping into stereotypes, he captures the rich voices of a full range of characters--from Sister Kathleen's thick Irish brogue to the rough pidgin of the island natives. This is a picture of the Pacific Theater never before seen. P.E.F. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

March 19, 2007
This is Hickam's third WWII action saga featuring Capt. Josh Thurlow, an officer exhibiting military insight and preternatural fighting abilities. The book opens in 1943 as an American fleet assembles off Tarawa, and the Marines prepare to land. Observing from the deck of a transport, Thurlow points out flaws in the attack plan and predicts the disaster that follows. Although only a spectator, Thurlow cannot resist the lure of battle; he leaps into a landing craft, struggles to shore and rallies the few surviving Marines until reinforcements arrive. Wounded during the melee, Thurlow loses consciousness only to awaken in a caravan of outriggers with a beautiful young nun, a dozen Polynesians and three nondescript Marines. The nun and her flock had endured the invasion as prisoners of the Japanese and are returning to the Far Reaches, their home islands, now occupied by Japanese troops. The nun has near-impossible plans in mind for Thurlow and a painful secret of her own; fans of the genre will know what to expect. Hickam (Rocket Boys
; The Ambassador's Son
) keeps the stakes high and the tension taut in this fast-moving historical.