DAVID PROSS

David Pross is a helicopter pilot.

He loves the craft and has made his career out of flying them. Unfortunately for him, he is so good that his skills act as a beacon for people needing the very best to get themselves out of trouble, and just about everyone agrees that Pross is one of the very best. Pross, though, is not a man who seeks danger and excitement. Being behind the stick of a powerful air craft is excitement enough. He would rather stay at home with his wife and two young children than go on dangerous missions into countries filled with people wanting to kill him.

Pross got his start as a sometime pilot and fulltime navigator while in the Royal Air Force. Soon his skills as a pilot far outweighed his navigating skills and he became one of the stars in military, especially when it came to search and rescue work. Extracting drowning victims from turbulent seas was normal with the occasional request to pull injured or stuck climbers from mountainsides where inches separated whirling blades from granite cliffs. He was the best.

Eventually, the time came for Pross to leave the military and take a chance with his own helicopter company. Ferrying office executives from one city to another might not have been as exciting as his previous line of work but it paid the bills and kept him in the air where he loved being. And it got him home for supper most nights with his family and that was as he wanted it to be.

He certainly never wanted visits from the British Secret Service, or from people claiming to be from the CIA, but he got those as well. What many did not really understand about Pross was that the fairly mild, easy-going man struggling to keep a business going was nothing at all like the highly skilled and trained man of action he became when he took flight.

Also involved in the three adventures, saving his butt several times over, is the absolutely enthralling Sian Logan, a beautiful young woman who is an agent working for British Intelligence. In the first mission, she is assigned to bodyguard Pross. In the second, she ropes him into helping. In the third, they just get thrown together. There is no doubt that Pross gains a very deep affection for Logan, and it is mutual, but Pross's devotion to his wife and family remain strong. Logan is 23 when the series begins, young for more careers but she tells truthfully that she is already quite old. She shows numerous times that she can handle herself. Once when Pross asked her the very personal question as to how many people she has had to kill, she replied, "Not many. Too many." That is a very old person speaking.

This series is closely related to another series written by the same author, that of Gordon Gallagher. It is the close friendship between Gallagher and Pross that prompts his entry into the clandestine world. Gallagher plays a very small but important part in the first book and Pross crosses over in the Gallagher book WindShear.

At first I had not thought to include the David Pross books because he was a pilot, not a spy, and military dramas are something I try to keep from making their way into this site because I want to deal with the person, not the unit. Unless the unit is devoted to spying, it does not get in. Upon further reflection, however, I changed my mind. Pross is a helicopter pilot and his involvement with the clandestine services is in that regard but the actions behind the joystick are far outshadowed by the events leading up to that action. When you throw in the major costar role of Sian Logan, you have a series that definitely belongs.

Mr. Savarin is one fantastic author. He has two series in this collection and both rate high, both being incredibly enjoyable and worthy of the "unputdownable" description. Just as I devoured the Gordon Gallagher series, I could not leave the Pross books sitting for very long. I have a couple of books in his other series and will be enjoying them soon.

One of the aspects that makes the Pross so good, and so different from the Gallagher series, is that Pross is darn good at being a pilot and is a very intelligent and capable man outside the aircraft but he is decidedly not trained in spycraft and would be a floundering fish against the nasties that he comes up against were it not for his inate good sense. And Logan, of course.