This book is a mixture of two parts, what the author has written and what he's extracted from action reports from Mosquito pilots, with a few other personal recollections thrown in.

The reproduction reports are interesting, if a little repetitive at times simply due to the nature of the original reporting system itself.

The author's contribution, however is frankly poor. It is often almost impossible to wade through the text to understand his narrative thread. This is partly as there are often significant details of the individuals shoehorned into the body text. This does give acknowledgement to the individuals involved, of course, which I cannot criticise, but with an extensive index that lists each and every combat success of the Mossie (which is a decent addition to be fair) there was surely space for the people to be added in detail in an appendix as their inclusion simply confuses the main text.

In addition we get squadrons referred to by number in the opening of a paragraph and then by nickname, although I only presume this as we're never told that's what it is. Numbers of raids or shot down seem to change paragraph to paragraph and overall it just becomes a mess that's hard to read. By the end I was almost skipping the text and reading just the combat reports.

The main issue here is that there a huge story to tell, but the author doesn't. The development of technology, what it did, how it helped the night-fighters, why we could creep up on their but they couldn't ours, all of this is mentioned in passing with new kit simply appearing in the text with almost no, if any, explanation. Had the text inserted that information instead of excessive detail on aircraft number and people's ranks, (and been edited a bit better) this might have been excellent - the research is there after all, but it doesn't.

2 stars is one extra for the combat reports. ( )