Sunday 28th June 1942

Flight Sergeant Dennis Copping took off in a single-seat Kittyhawk fighter for a short flight across Egypt. He never arrived at his destination. The aeroplane was later found crash-landed, virtually intact, three hundred miles into the Sahara with no sign of the pilot. There is evidence he survived the landing and indeed stayed with the aeroplane for a while, but he has so far never been found.

Why was it there and what happened to the pilot?

After extensive research including regular contact with surviving relatives and the man who first found the aeroplane, Jonathan Nicholas has pieced together Dennis Copping’s desert war blending real people, events and places into an exciting new novel, a thrilling wartime desert mystery never-before-told.

Jonathan Nicholas has been a professional writer since 2011 when he had a regular column in Police Review magazine and with the publication of his first book Hospital Beat. He has been a full-time author since retiring from the police in 2014. A lifelong aviation enthusiast, he became a glider pilot in 1977 with the Air Cadets and obtained a Private Pilot’s Licence in 1978. He is based in Nottingham.