This is a Will Jaeger thriller, in which he battles to prevent the release of a deadly toxin that threatens global calamity, as well as continuing a long search to find his kidnapped wife and son. I haven’t read the first book in this series (Ghost Flight), but the story held together pretty well all the same.
The book had some exciting passages and was an enjoyable read, particularly the battles in the depths of the jungle and the heroics of Jaeger and his team – all areas where Grylls brings his expertise from the SAS to bear. Unfortunately, the climax to the story fell pretty flat for me. On the one hand, I’m willing to believe that a handful of special forces operatives can win a gun fight against a small army of mercenaries (!). On the other, I can’t believe that a source of immunity against a plague can be isolated from a blood specimen, turned into a vaccine, and mass-produced at world scale in just a small number of days/weeks. That incredible feat of bio-engineering certainly deserves more than seven lines in the epilogue (and that’s in a large font)!
This is another excellent thriller in Connelly’s Harry Bosch series – it also features his half-brother Micky Haller. 
I followed the route from the Pathfinder Guide, which starts at “Helvellyn Base Camp” in Glenridding, climbs up the side of Grisedale then circles around the beautiful Red Tarn. Striding Edge is accurately described in the book as “positively hair-raising”, particularly because you have to scramble over fairly severe crags at the beginning and end of the ridge. Whilst there is a narrow path just below the ridge, that has a vertical drop to the side and still requires some scrambling – so this isn’t a walk for novices.
This was a short, family walk starting from Skelwith Bridge. We parked on the road near the Skelwith Bridge Hotel and roughly followed the route to Loughrigg Tarn from the Jarrold Lake District Short Walks book. After a short ascent through a holiday park of wooden chalets, the route around the tarn is quite clear and largely flat. There is a small stream into the tarn which can be jumped or crossed by stepping stones.
I’ve just finished reading this technical book on Java. It’s widely recommended if you’re going to work on a Java codebase and provides best practice guidelines on:
This book isn’t the starting place for learning Java though (and doesn’t intend to be). For that, it’s worth turning to a more basic set of materials. I worked through a PluralSight course, 
This book is a sequel to Cold Blood, which I hadn’t read. That meant I had little understanding about why the main character, Nick Stone, and his team were being hunted by the mysterious “Owl” and what intelligence they were hiding as leverage to keep themselves safe.
The sub-title of this book is “Secret diaries of a Junior Doctor”, because Adam Kay was for some years a doctor in the National Health Service. His stories are often hilarious but they also reveal just what stress the doctors and the NHS as a whole are under. He had a successful career as a doctor, including several promotions – but ultimately, the crazy demands of the job took its toll on his well-being as well as his relationships and he had to leave.
I was lucky to attend the 2018 Mountbatten lecture at Savoy Place, London. This year’s speakers were Dr Julia Sutcliffe of BAE Systems and Air Marshal Julian Young of the Royal Air Force.
Dr Sutcliffe’s theme was “Air Sector Technology – is the sky still the limit?” and spoke of breakthrough technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence as the 4th Industrial Revolution (after Steam, Electricity and Electronics/Computing). Her interest in military air systems is the generation of huge amounts of information for each single flight – not only from machine performance but also from crew health metrics. It would be a game changer to be able to receive the telemetry in real time so that appropriate action could be anticipated and actioned as soon as the plane returns to base. Other topics were unmanned systems for dirty or dangerous tasks and “
Air Marshal Young’s theme was “RAF 2118 – Engineering the next 100 years”. His point was that the Royal Air Force has been entwined with technology throughout its whole life, with innovation often the deciding factor in conflicts. Innovation has produced accuracy improvements in weapons delivery as well as amazing reliability for engines (such as the EJ200 in Typhoons). Novel technologies can also deliver increased operational performance, reduce production costs and reduce through-life savings – leaving more money to buy shiny new aeroplanes.
Suppose intelligence discovered that a terrorist organisation was planning a fresh atrocity that would shock the world, but had no further leads to prevent it. Then it might be appropriate to take the longest of shots – send an agent into Iraq to infiltrate that organisation at a senior level, in the hope that the secret is shared with him. 
This book is set in the early days of the space race. Scientists have assessed the risk of previously unknown organisms being released on Earth (either alien bacteria brought back to Earth by rockets or Earth-bound organisms changed by exposure to the environment of space). The result is Wildfire – an underground facility with multiple levels of increasing levels of sterilisation, in which the scientists would research any such contaminated material.
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