Dana Stabenow's Blog

I’m a big fan of Marshall’s books on the influence of geography on our political decisions, and here he takes on a topic dear to my heart: the exploration and colonization and, oh yes, the militarization of space. It turns out there is a lot going on on low earth orbit, not to mention the moon, the Lagrange points, and Mars, and by some unlikely actors like Israel and the UAE and half of Africa. Everyone has at least a token space program now. The US, Russia, China, India, and ESA, take note.

They all are, of course. Of 4900 satellites orbiting above us when his book went to print, 3,000 of them are US-made and controlled, but China is coming up fast on our back trail with 500 and Russia, having led the way with Sputnik, Gagarin, Tereshkova, and the first unmanned moon landing, is now concentrating its efforts on military applications. Space lasers, anyone? Already deployed on Earth. I knew those Insight Helicarriers in The Winter Soldier were inspired by true events.

In 2003 the senior command of the Russian Aerospace Forces had watched keenly as the US military sliced through Iraq’s half-a-million-strong army using satellites to target troops, equipment and buildings precisely. By the time the US ground forces rolled in, Iraq’s army was in no shape to resist…during the Second World War, 4,500 air sorties had been required to drop 9,000 bombs to destory a railway bridge…By the time of the invasion of Iraq, a single missile guided by satellite could do the job.

The scariest chapter of this book is Chapter 9, “Space Wars,” in which Marshall posits various scenarios for Cuban Missile Crisis-level incidents precipitating not quite all out war.

Each time humanity has ventured into a new domain it has brought war with it…Given that technologically advanced powers now rely so much on space, the domain is central to modern military thinking…It is therefore a tremendous advantage for China to take out US space support prior to initiating a terrestrial military action that would be opposed by the USA.

The US, Russia, and China all now have the capability of knocking out each other’s satellites by occluding their electronics or by running one vehicle smack into another. We’ve all already done it, accidentally (maybe) and deliberately (certainly).

NASA estimates there are more than 23,000 pieces of debris in orgit around Earth that are larger tha 10 centimetres in diameter (roughly the size of a grapefruit). There are another 500,000 sized between 1 and 10 centimetres (a tennis ball is about 7 centimetres) and in total, about 100 million bigger than 1 millimetre. Most pieces of debris may be small, but they are travelling at 25,000 km/h, which would be troubling if you came into contact with one. A 1-centimetre fragment travelling at that speed can create as much energy as a small car crashing into you, or your spaceship, at 40 km/h.

“Troubling.” Heh.

Leave off imagining for a moment a huge solar flare knocking out all our satellites and consider the possibility that we do it to ourselves, leaving a huge cloud of orbiting debris from destroyed satellites, space stations (oh yes, the Chinese have one of those, too), and maybe one of Gerald K. O’Neill’s habitats Jeff Bezos is planning to build. That cloud that would preclude us from launching more, of anything. Maybe I shouldn’t have given up my landline after all.

In the face of these dire possibilities, Marshall retains his optimism and his humor. He points out what space exploration has contributed to our quality of life thus far.

Computer science, telecommunications, microtechnology and solar power technology…Modern portable water purification systems…lighter breathing masks used by firefighters…heat-resistant clothing. Laptop computers, wireless headsets, LED lights and memory-foam mattresses? All can be traced back to the science of the Space Race…

The Lagrange points are car parks in space. We’ll begin construction of permanently manned habitats on the moon by the end of this decade, even if it is driven by the prospect of mining essential elements in short (or shortening) supply on Earth. The 2020 Artemis Accords attempted to establish some sort of international law for future lunar colonization and exploitation, and are flawed (China and Russia didn’t sign on) but at least a start. In the end he says

All the imagined and unimagined wonders are out there, in front of us, waiting to be discovered by Homo Spaciens.

A fascinating and enlightening read, highly recommended.

Excerpt…

Langley, Virginia
October 19, 2004

Hugh’s temper was not improved by the sight of his overflowing mailbox or by the stack of message slips held down on his desk by the soapstone bear paperweight.  The bear had been a gift from Sara the last Christmas they were in high school together.  He looked at it, fulminating.  He wanted to pick it up and heave it through the window.

He didn’t, of course, but sitting on the impulse just pissed him off more.

There had, in fact, been no moment during which he had not been thoroughly pissed off since he woke up alone in his Anchorage hotel room yesterday morning, and then just to ice the cake he’d had to run for his plane.  His admin assistant had taken one look at his face as he came in the door this morning and speech had literally withered on her tongue.  He took a deep breath and let it out, uncapped his vente quadruple shot americano, took a big swallow to get his heart started, and began wading through the mess.

There was the usual assortment of pleas for help from agents and informers in the field, from Tokyo to Taiwan to Ho Chi Minh City to Shanghai to Bangkok to Singapore to Calcutta.  They wanted to pay off a source, they needed to verify intelligence, they had had to bribe a local official for a satellite uplink.  The official had discovered who he was really dealing with and had doubled the already astronomical price.  Hugh was in no mood to be generous with the hard-earned tax dollars of the American citizen this morning and he rejected all but one request out of hand.

A high-ranking Pakistani military officer had made an oblique approach to a junior officer of the American embassy at a cocktail party in Karachi and the consul had handed the contact off to the case officer in Delhi, who had confirmed the identity of the officer in question and was recommending the agency make the officer an offer for his services.  A walk-in snitch, Hugh’s favorite kind, and he emailed the case officer to proceed.  There was too damn little in the way of human source intelligence available to the Directorate of Intelligence these days and he was willing to investigate every possible source.  There were a dozen open cases that needed monitoring, some that needed orders issued for further action, and one that needed closing, because the source had disappeared, which meant he had probably been discovered, which meant that he was either dead or in the wind.  The intel the source had produced had bordered on hearsay and speculation, but he’d been on the payroll for six years, during which time he’d come up with maybe three really useful pieces of information, one concerning the sale of CBRN weapons components to North Korea, and the case officer in Shanghai had thought they ought to do something for the family.  Hugh almost rejected this request, too, until he realized he was in no frame of mind to be making this kind of decision.  He emailed the man in Shanghai and told him to do what he thought appropriate within budgetary constraints.

The phone rang.  He snatched it up.  “What?”

The voice on the other end said, “Sadly, that does not sound like the voice of someone who just got laid.”

Dana sez–

In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard.

My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.

But first, a message from Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Storyknife’s executive director:

I wanted to briefly talk about fundraising. Storyknife is 54% toward meeting its 2024 fundraising goal. Donating money to an organization like Storyknife isn’t about instant gratification. It’s not like going to a performance the night after you donated to a ballet troupe. Instead, in six months or a year, you get to hold Jodi Savage’s The Death of a Jaybird: Essays on Mothers and Daughters and the Things They Leave Behind or Renata Golden’s Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment or Sara Daniel Rivera’s The Blue Mimes and sink into the artistry of their words on the page.

When you donate to Storyknife, you change the narrative. You support the vision of an incredibly diverse group of women writers. You support relationships between women writers that build each other up. You put a payment forward toward a future when the women of Storyknife change the way you see the world, offer you stories you couldn’t have imagined, give you hope for healing and for building.

This may be a challenging year for tiny nonprofits like Storyknife to get your attention. It might seem more expedient to give to large organizations who can afford glossy mailers and advertisements on social media. I hoping that you’ll remember that a residency at Storyknife transforms lives. That you can be the person who makes that possible for a woman writer, who makes it possible for her to believe her words are important.

And Dana sez–

If you can please give by clicking through here. Thank you!

A coffee table book about brooches, but don’t let that frivolous description stop you. Madeleine Albright, first woman secretary of state, accessorized with pins all her life, but it wasn’t until Saddam Hussein called her “an unparalleled serpent” in a poem he allegedly wrote himself that she retaliated by wearing a pin in the shape of a gold snake coiled around a branch, a tiny diamond hanging from its mouth, to their next meeting. “…leaving the meeting,” she writes

I encountered a member of the UN press corps who was familiar with the poem; she asked why I had chosen to wear that particular pin. As the television cameras zoomed in on the brooch, I smiled and said that it was just my way of sending a message…Before long, and without intending it, I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal. Former President George H.W. Bush had been known for saying, “Read my lips.” I began urging colleagues and reporters to “Read my pins.”

This book is a lavishly illustrated collection of Albright’s pins strung together with a series of remembrances of the times she wore them. She wore a blue diamante dove, head down, when addressing the downing of two American planes by Cuba. She wore an elaborate bee pin to meetings with Yasir Arafat. “My pin,” she writes, “reflected my mood.” She wore a gold angel pin during public remarks on the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. She frequently matched her pins to the country she was visiting, as in wearing her zebra pins to meet with Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

At the end there is even a Pindex, which is where I went to find the page number for the photograph of the miniature silver and amber saxophone, trumpet, electric guitar, cello and piano, which she wore at the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz event honoring Stevie Wonder. She writes

It’s hard to tell from the picture, but I managed to get an entire jazz band onto my jacket.

Her collection is certainly eclectic, some pins encrusted with gemstones in the fashion of Fabergé, others looking like they came out of a Crackerjack box. Some of them are fabulous, like the green dragon and sword from Turkey, and all of them are charming, including her favorite, a heart-shaped clay pin created by her five-year old daughter Katie and given to Albright on Valentine’s Day. “I have often worn it since,” Albright writes.

The pin reflects one of the indispensable purposes of jewelry: to bind families together and connect one generation to the next.”

And you will love the ants scampering around on the very last page. Delightful.

Allow me to introduce you to Fix the News, an aggregation of all the good news out there that you sure won’t see in mainstream media but you will in your inbox. From the most recent newsletter:

‘Left Behind’ America stages remarkable comeback
Some of the country’s worst-off counties in the Midwest and Southeast have bounced back since COVID-19, thanks to significant growth in employment and the establishment of new businesses in the last three years, marking the fastest economic expansion since the presidency of Bill Clinton: ‘This is the kind of thing that we couldn’t have even dreamed about five or six years ago.’ NYT

Yes, that link is hot, as is every link in FTN’s newsletter, so you can clink right through to the source of every single story they include.

What else have they got this week? Well, let’s see…how about Ronin the Rat detecting mines in Cambodia? The greatest mammal migration on earth? (Yes, it’s in Africa, but it’s not the one you think of first.) The first river in the US to be returned to its natural state? The newest Federal Duck Stamp, junior and senior? Barbara Kingsolver’s pledge for the Climate Corps?

Maybe you’ve been taught to be skeptical about renewable energy, say, for example, wind power. Okay.

Wind is quietly blowing away coal in the United States
In April, wind power generated 28% more electricity than coal for the second month in a row. Wind did surpass coal once before, in April last year, but this time it’s by a much larger margin and for two consecutive months. Fossil gas remains by far the largest source of electricity generation—but renewables are coming for it next. Sherwood

28 percent more electricity than coal. For the second month in a row. Yeah, baby, you bet that emphasis is mine. How about we catch some rays next?

The United States is about to get its first solar-covered canal
The country’s first canal-based solar project is nearing completion on tribal lands south of Phoenix, Arizona. Thousands of kilometres of federally-owned canals stretch across the country—covering them in solar panels would allow for greater power production on already-used land and help canals function better by preventing evaporation and inhibiting algae growth. Canary Media

Another hot link, go ahead, click through. But here’s a video if you’d rather watch.

Solar River on the Casa Blanca from An On on Vimeo.

My favorite piece of this issue, because there always is one:

We see oil peaking in 2025 ~ BP

Combustion engines could still see ‘significant improvements’ that would make them competitive and will be around for a ‘very, very long time.’ ~ Saudi Aramco

Someone here is wrong, and we’ll give you a little clue: it’s not BP.

I could pull quotes until I run out of room on WordPress, but I’ll stop now, because seriously, you should subscribe to Fix the News yourself. Yes, you have to pay a fee, but get this:

They give away most of what they earn (!)

and they tell you exactly how much and to whom, like here:

In other news, we have a new charity partner! Phola operates a mobile mental health service that travels around communities in Johannesburg, South Africa, that are struggling with gender-based violence, conflict, and poverty. Their caravan ‘of joy and tears’ is at the heart of everything they do, a place where tens of thousands of people have found healing, but it has reached the end of its run.

We are sending them $5,000 USD to buy a new caravan. This donation will allow them to keep providing culturally-relevant counselling services for underserved communities (including vulnerable children and women who have survived violence and abuse), break down barriers to mental health access, and bring hope and healing to those who need it the most. We are so grateful to you all—thank you for making this happen.

A subscription to Fix the News will fix what ails you. Works as a gift, too.

Go ahead, leave doomscrolling behind forever. You know you want to.

excerpt…

The Chinese saw the waiter looking and returned a flat, unblinking stare.  There was something reptilian in that stare, without fear or feeling.  For all his experience and sangfroid, the waiter had to make a conscious effort not to take a step back.  He had to clear his throat before he could summon enough voice to ask them what they wanted.  The younger man ordered Tiger Beer.  The Chinese ordered green tea.  The waiter left, more quickly than he had arrived, and regained his manhood by bullying a British couple into a table in a high-traffic area right next to the bar, and forcing them to order the bamboo martinis instead of the lager they had come in for. 

The Singaporean pulled out a cell phone and placed it in the center of the table.  The Chinese lit a cigarette from the end of the one he already had going.

The phone rang.  The older Korean picked it up.

A pleasant voice speaking fluent English with a thick East European accent said, “Mr. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Your Chinese guest is Mr. Fang.  He holds a master’s certificate, has thirty years’ experience at sea, and will be responsible for putting together the crew and acquiring and operating the vessel.  We have the highest confidence in his abilities.”

“Yes,” Mr. Smith said.

“The Singaporean is Mr. Noortman.  In your initial contact with us, you stressed the need for someone who specialized in cargo.”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Noortman is, quite simply, a genius with international maritime shipping.  He is also a full partner in Mr. Fang’s concern.”

“Yes.”

“Your fee was posted to our account in Geneva this morning.  I believe this concludes our transaction.  It has been a pleasure doing business with you.  If you need help in finding the appropriate personnel for future ventures, please don’t hesitate to contact us.”

“Thank you.”  The older Korean disconnected and put the phone in his pocket.  “English?” he said, looking at Fang.

Fang inclined his head, as did Noortman.

The older Korean’s smile was noticeably lacking in either friendliness or humor.  “My name is Smith.”  He indicated the younger Korean.  “This is Jones.”

Fang said, “I am told you need a ship.”

“Yes,” Smith said.  “A ship of a specific kind.”

Fang suppressed a yawn.  “How big?”

Smith slid a piece of paper across the table.

Fang read it and looked less bored.  “This is…an unusual request.”

Smith said nothing.

Fang passed the slip of paper to Noortman.  Noortman’s eyebrows went up and he exchanged a glance with Fang.  Fang said, “Did you have a particular port in mind?”

“Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.”

Fang was impressed and not favorably.  “It will be expensive,” he said at last.

Dana sez–

In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard.

My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.

I heard Goodwin talk about this book on NPR, and she sounded like she’d been an eyewitness to the events. Sold me the book.

On June 17th–I’ve been a hundred pages from the end for ten days. I don’t want Abe to die.

July 17th — Okay, I finally made myself finish. Abe’s dead and I’m a wreck.

In this book Goodwin puts Abraham Lincoln in the context of his peers, many of whom ran against him for the first Republican nomination for president (remember they’d just invented that party) and one of whom, Stanton, had treated him with outright contempt in a law case years before. Seward accepted the job of Secretary of State thinking Lincoln would be his puppet, and Chase literally ran his second campaign for president out of the Department of the Treasury. Lincoln understood them all, tolerated them all, put them all to work for the nation that needed them so badly, and jollied, coaxed, cajoled and reasoned them all to victory. A reporter asked him how he could take all these vipers to his bosom and Lincoln replied that these were the best and most able men available and their country needed them, and that he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t put them to work for it. There can’t be anyone who has ever occupied the Oval Office more selfless than Abe.

This book is wonderfully written, accessible even to the most casual reader, full of humor and choler and kindness and vitriol, and wisdom. Goodwin has that ability known only to the best historians (David McCullough does, too) to pluck the exact quote necessary from the record to illuminate the scene she is describing, and make the transition from past to present seamless. Listen to Goodwin on Lincoln in his 1862 state of the union address (pp. 406-7):

…he closed his message with a graceful and irrefutable argument against the continuation of slavery in a democratic society, the very essence of which opened “the way to all,” granted “hope to all,” and advanced the “condition of all.” In this “just, and generous, and prosperous system,” he reasoned, “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.” Then, reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his own experience, Lincoln added: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Clearly this upward mobility, the possibility of self-realization so central to the idea of America, was closed to the slave unless and until he became a free man.

The American Dream, articulated, in words guaranteed to be understood by everyone. You close this book knowing not just about these people, you actually feel like you know them, especially Abe.

Impossible, after reading this book, not to wonder what our nation would look like had Lincoln survived his second term. Impossible not to grieve his loss.

Excerpt…

October 5, 2004
Pattaya Beach, Thailand

Much later, when the glass had stopped flying and the screams of pain and fear had died to moans and whimpers and the hoarse rattles of death, when the bodies had been taken to the morgue and the injured to the hospitals, when the television cameras had gone and workers had begun to clear the rubble and business along Central Street began to return to a shaken sort of normal, very few people remembered the two men who had been standing on the corner of Soi Cowboy when the bomb went off.

They were definitely Asian, or so said a vigorous, middle-aged woman who owned a pornographic comic book store nearby.  Slim, short, narrow eyes, sallow skin, neatly clipped straight black hair, she remembered them clad in identical short-sleeved shirts and light cotton slacks in nondescript colors.  A hundred like them sidled into her tiny shop every day to thumb through her merchandise and avoiding eye contact as they made their purchases.

A young man, the proud owner of his own car who specialized in delivering takeout to the pleasure palaces on Soi Cowboy and whose car had been parked twenty feet from the Fun House when the explosion occurred had been blown backwards the entire length of the block.  He had landed hard on his back at the feet of the two Asian men, splattered with nine orders of pad thai and the brains of a twenty-year-old American Marine on leave from Camp Butler on Okinawa.  As he looked up at them a man’s leg hit the side of the Pattaya Inn just above their heads, and what the delivery man found most odd was that the two men hadn’t looked at the leg, or even at him, instead focusing their attention on the chaos that followed the blast.

An elderly Japanese tourist, seeking relief from his shrew of a wife in Nagasaki in the flesh pots of a resort known for its willingness to provide pretty much anything animal, vegetable or mineral in the way of entertainment was sure the two men he had hobbled hurriedly by were Korean, because he’d killed his share in World War II and he ought to know.

At the end of the day the body count had climbed to one hundred and fourteen dead and another two hundred injured.  At least half of these were Thai nationals, many of them dancers and prostitutes, sex shop owners and bartenders.  They merited little beyond the standard obligatory protestations of outrage and vows of retaliation from the nation’s capital, quickly spoken and as quickly forgotten.

The other half was another matter.  Seventeen American servicemen were dead, twenty-two more injured.  Eleven Australians, four New Zealanders, nine Germans, and one Frenchman would never see home again.  It was the Japanese tourists who were hit hardest, although it would take a month before all the body parts had been assembled, DNA matches made.  The count would stop at thirty-one.

In the following days the world waited for someone to take responsibility for the bomb.

Dana sez–

In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard.

My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.

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a summer version of the Roadhouse Report…

It’s #inmygarden time. From left, the iris I planted so long ago I can’t remember its name finally bloomed, the Himalayan poppies have really gone to town this year, bless their blueblueblue hearts, and, I confess, that Red Charm peony was planted this month and is only blooming because it came home from the nursery bearing a bud the size of a baby’s fist, which it lost no time in opening. I’m going to take that as a promise of future fecundity. More photos from my garden for your viewing pleasure can be found on my Facebook author page. This is just the best part of my year.

In re work…

*I am now writing Kate24, whose title was revealed in the last Roadhouse Report. How would you like to meet Emaa at age forty?

* I’ve completed the copyedit of Abduction of a Slave, aka Isis4, publishing in January 2025 and now available for pre-order, and returned it to be typeset. I’m sure I’ll get the proofs back with a 24-hour turnaround request right about the time I’m totally immersed in Kate24. Because that’s how things usually roll.

*I heart the National Park Service. On my road trip vacation last month not only did I get to see bison and Yellowstone and Little Big Horn and Devil’s Tower and the Badlands (and more bison) and Crazy Horse and Dignity and so much more, I also found a whole bunch of great books in NPS gift shops that will inform my Harvey Girls series. Just one example: Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A history of medicine on the American Frontier. That should make for some fun reading.

Back in regular format in September, when I’ll begin excerpting the first three Eye of Isis novels on Stabenow.com. You know, just in case I have yet to bludgeon you into reading them. Enjoy your summer, everyone! 

          Not the Ones Dead →   Theft of an Idol →   Silk and Song →   Blindfold Game →   Spoils of the Dead→   Red Planet Run →     Subscribe to the Roadhouse Report →         Share    Share    Forward  You’re receiving this email because you’re subscribed to Dana’s newsletter. Don’t want it any more? Just click the link below. Unsubscribe   @media (max-width:619px){.email-flexible-footer .left-aligned-footer .column,.email-flexible-footer .center-aligned-footer,.email-flexible-footer .right-aligned-footer .column{max-width:100% !important;text-align:center !important;width:100% !important}.flexible-footer-logo{margin-left:0px !important;margin-right:0px !important}.email-flexible-footer .left-aligned-footer .flexible-footer__share-button__container,.email-flexible-footer .center-aligned-footer .flexible-footer__share-button__container,.email-flexible-footer .right-aligned-footer .flexible-footer__share-button__container{display:inline-block;margin-left:5px !important;margin-right:5px !important}.email-flexible-footer__additionalinfo--center{text-align:center !important}.email-flexible-footer .left-aligned-footer table,.email-flexible-footer .center-aligned-footer table,.email-flexible-footer .right-aligned-footer table{display:table !important;width:100% !important}.email-flexible-footer .footer__share-button,.email-flexible-footer .email-footer__additional-info{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px}}

Read in 2009:
The twenty-fourth Dalziel and Pascoe novel. Hill still at the top of his game, maybe even more so in this stripped-down tale of Dalziel’s first case after getting blown up by a bomb in The Death of Dalziel. All of the action takes place over one fraught day, and all the usual suspects, Pascoe, Wieldy, Ellie, even the idiot Hector are present and accounted for, along with a handful of new characters equally well drawn and a bait-and-switch plot that keeps you guessing right to the end. Of course the real question is, is the Fat Man back, or is he on his way to the knacker’s yard?

Reread in 2024:
Holds up well as it was long enough since the first read that I completely forgot the twist at the end and it’s a zinger. A slightly melancholic read, though, as we know now it is the last Dalziel and Pascoe novel. Still glad that Dalziel went out on a high, although my favorites in this series are Pictures of Perfection, the best shaggy dog story ever written, and The Wood Beyond, where so much goes on you need a scorecard to keep up. But my all time favorite Reginald Hill novel is No Man’s Land. As with The Wood Beyond it is easy to see that World War I was a hot button issue with Hill, and he wrote about it better than just about anyone.