This second book in Freeland’s planned trilogy about the McCormick military family aims to put readers in the pilot’s seat.

The saga began in Legacy of Honor: The Patriarch (2022)with Sam McCormick’s service in World War I. The main character of the current volume is Sam’s son, Sean McCormick,who flies B-17 and B-29 bombing missions against strategic sites in Germany and Japan during the last two years of World War II and, in the book’s second half, in the Korean War. Freeland is an absolute master of flight-combat narrative; a decorated veteran of air combat in Vietnam, his ability to put the reader in the seat of a B-17 beset by German fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire is superb: “We are now flying in German-controlled airspace….Radio chatter is sparse but intense.