A.C. Edwards (Author of Dragon's Back)

A.C. Edwards rated a book it was amazing Let Sleeping Bodies Lie by Anthony (Tony) English (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Authentic, intelligent, and beautifully subverts expectations! 'Let Sleeping Bodies Lie' by Anthony English is a gripping and highly original collection of short stories that benefits immensely from the author's real-life career across SE Asia and SW ...more
Aug 31, 2026 05:23PM · like · see review
A.C. Edwards rated a book it was amazing King of Beasts by Tony Park (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I’ve been reading Tony Park for a long time, and King of Beasts is Park doing what he does best, but on a particularly broad canvas. It starts in war-torn Ukraine before sweeping back to Africa, bringing together soldiers, spies, mercenaries, hunters ...more
Aug 23, 2026 07:53PM · like · see review
A.C. Edwards rated a book liked it Blood of Kings (Unconquered, #1) by M.S. Olney (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is a good yarn, and, set around the death of Edward and the invasion of England by Hardrada and William, it sits well in the historical context. It's exciting and moves along at a good pace. But it was let down by constant grammar and spelling e ...more
Aug 11, 2026 05:43PM · like · see review
A.C. Edwards wants to read Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jun 10, 2026 12:28AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
A.C. Edwards wants to read Let Sleeping Bodies Lie by Anthony (Tony) English (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jun 09, 2026 05:44PM · like
A.C. Edwards and 5 other people liked Anthony English's review of Australia's Secret Army: "Australia’s Secret Army absorbed me, not only because its content connects with my novel (Death of a Coast Watcher, 2020) but in large part because Michael Veitch founds rich characters on prodigious research about individual Europeans, New Guineans " Read more of this review »
Jun 09, 2026 05:39PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Australia's Secret Army by Michael Veitch. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Australia's Secret Army by Michael Veitch <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
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A.C. Edwards rated a book it was amazing Death of a Coast Watcher by Anthony English	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Some novels announce themselves quietly and build toward their power. This one does not. Anthony English opens Death of a Coast Watcher with an act of violence so precisely rendered – a beheading on Bougainville Island in 1943, witnessed in the silen ...more
Jun 09, 2026 04:58AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Death of a Coast Watcher by Anthony English. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Death of a Coast Watcher by Anthony English <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
A.C. Edwards is now following Mark Mills Author of The Savage Garden
Jun 08, 2026 06:08PM · like
A.C. Edwards is now following Anthony English Author of Death of a Coast Watcher
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A.C. Edwards rated a book it was amazing

Let Sleeping Bodies Lie
by Anthony (Tony) English (Goodreads Author)

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Authentic, intelligent, and beautifully subverts expectations!

'Let Sleeping Bodies Lie' by Anthony English is a gripping and highly original collection of short stories that benefits immensely from the author's real-life career across SE Asia and SW ...more

A.C. Edwards rated a book it was amazing

King of Beasts
by Tony Park (Goodreads Author)

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I’ve been reading Tony Park for a long time, and King of Beasts is Park doing what he does best, but on a particularly broad canvas. It starts in war-torn Ukraine before sweeping back to Africa, bringing together soldiers, spies, mercenaries, hunters I’ve been reading Tony Park for a long time, and King of Beasts is Park doing what he does best, but on a particularly broad canvas. It starts in war-torn Ukraine before sweeping back to Africa, bringing together soldiers, spies, mercenaries, hunters, old enemies and some wonderfully complicated characters whose loyalties are rarely quite as straightforward as they first appear.

As always with Park, the locations are superb. He has an ability to put you somewhere without stopping the story to describe it, whether it is the cold brutality of the fighting in Ukraine or the heat, dust and wild country of southern Africa. The landscape is never simply scenery. It shapes the people and the story, and there is a genuine sense throughout the novel that Park knows this part of the world intimately.

The plotting is equally assured. There is a lot going on here, with several apparently separate threads gradually drawing together, and Park handles the complexity without losing the pace. Just when you think you have worked out where the story is going, something shifts and the picture changes again. Some familiar characters return, which will be particularly satisfying for long-time readers, but you certainly don’t need to know the earlier books to enjoy this one.

What I particularly liked were the characters. Park has never been much interested in spotless heroes and pantomime villains, and King of Beasts is full of people carrying histories, grudges, divided loyalties and occasionally questionable motives. Even the people you think you understand have a habit of surprising you. The dialogue is punchy and natural, and there is that familiar Park mixture of violence, tension and dry humour that keeps the book moving even when the story becomes quite dark.

And it does move. The action sequences are excellent, but they never overwhelm the story. Beneath the gunfire, espionage and pursuit there are questions about family, loyalty, revenge and the things people will do when someone they love is threatened. There is also a strong conservation thread running through the novel which feels integral to the story rather than bolted onto it, and gives the title rather more meaning than might initially be apparent.

The last stretch is terrific. The various strands begin coming together, the pace lifts again and Park keeps a few cards very firmly hidden. I thought I had things reasonably well worked out by then. I hadn’t. There is a final twist in the tale that I certainly didn’t see coming, and which sent me back mentally through some of what I had read before.

Big, fast, and immensely entertaining, King of Beasts is Tony Park in very fine form. For existing readers there is the added pleasure of encountering some old friends and unfinished business, while for anyone coming to him for the first time, it is a very good demonstration of why he has built such a loyal readership. I thoroughly enjoyed it. ...more

A.C. Edwards rated a book liked it

Blood of Kings (Unconquered, #1)
by M.S. Olney (Goodreads Author)

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This is a good yarn, and, set around the death of Edward and the invasion of England by Hardrada and William, it sits well in the historical context. It's exciting and moves along at a good pace. But it was let down by constant grammar and spelling e ...more

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Ghost-Eye
by Amitav Ghosh

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Let Sleeping Bodies Lie
by Anthony (Tony) English (Goodreads Author)

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A.C. Edwards and 5 other people liked Anthony English's review of Australia's Secret Army:

Australia's Secret Army by Michael Veitch

"Australia’s Secret Army absorbed me, not only because its content connects with my novel (Death of a Coast Watcher, 2020) but in large part because Michael Veitch founds rich characters on prodigious research about individual Europeans, New Guineans " Read more of this review »

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Australia's Secret Army
by Michael Veitch

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A.C. Edwards rated a book it was amazing

Death of a Coast Watcher
by Anthony English

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Some novels announce themselves quietly and build toward their power. This one does not. Anthony English opens Death of a Coast Watcher with an act of violence so precisely rendered – a beheading on Bougainville Island in 1943, witnessed in the silen Some novels announce themselves quietly and build toward their power. This one does not. Anthony English opens Death of a Coast Watcher with an act of violence so precisely rendered – a beheading on Bougainville Island in 1943, witnessed in the silence of a jungle clearing – that the reader is not so much drawn into the story as seized by it. By the time the final image of that opening scene arrives, the butterfly returning as a wasp, and a sneer spinning into oblivion, you understand that everything that follows will live in the shadow of this moment. It is one of the most devastating closing lines to an opening chapter I have encountered.

What English has written is an epic – not in the popular sense of sweep and spectacle, though the novel has both, but in the older sense of a work that takes a single act and radiates outward from it across decades, continents, and generations. The execution of Hugh Rand, the Australian coast watcher, does not end with his death. It continues to work on the living – on those who witnessed it, on those who came after, on those who only ever heard its echo. This is the novel’s great structural and moral achievement: the demonstration that violence of a certain kind does not conclude. It metastasises.

English moves between New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, Australia, and Japan with a confidence that speaks to deep and lived knowledge of the Pacific and its cultures. The novel is never merely exotic in its settings; the landscapes and social textures are rendered with an anthropologist’s precision and a novelist’s feeling, so that place becomes inseparable from character and event. The colonial world English depicts with its hierarchies, its misunderstandings, its casual cruelties and occasional tenderness, is both historically specific and morally alive. He is equally at home inside a Japanese officer’s mind as inside an Australian colonial administrator’s, and this refusal to assign moral clarity along national lines is central to what makes the book so unsettling and so honest.

The prose throughout is beautifully controlled. English writes with economy and exactness – there is no waste here, no decoration for its own sake – and yet the cumulative effect is one of great richness. He is especially masterful in the moments of restraint, where what is withheld says as much as what is given. The questions the novel raises – about the ethics of memory, the mythology of wartime heroism, the inheritance of trauma, the capacity of institutions to suppress uncomfortable truths – are never posed directly. They arrive through character and incident, which is how literature at its best conducts its moral inquiry.

No character carries that burden more completely, or more hauntingly, than Charlotte. She inherits Rand’s shadow without ever having stood in it directly and pursues her own reckoning across decades and continents. But English leaves disturbingly, enticingly open the question of whether she achieves it; and what it has already cost her to have tried haunts the novel’s final pages as much as Rand himself.

Like Rand with Charlotte, this novel will stay with you long after you think it’s finished. ...more

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	Dragon's Back (The Dragon Series Book 1) 4.18 avg rating — 11 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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