‘Wings Over Valletta’ by Tracy Cook

Published by Allison & Busby,
21 May 2026.
ISBN: 978-0-7490-3329-3 (PB)

Forced adoption is in the news at the moment: babies born to unmarried mothers and wrenched away at a few days or hours old to be given a respectable home elsewhere. Nowadays the disgrace and stigma has ceased to exist, but a century ago it was rife. Kitty Campbell, protagonist of this wartime story, has never forgotten the child she was made to give up after a love affair with a man who neglected to tell her he already had a wife.   

Now Kitty is in Malta at the height of the Second World War, and when her naval officer father is killed in an air raid, she makes discoveries that make her own 'sin' pale into insignificance. Distinguished, ultra-respectable Vice-Admiral Campbell had a Maltese mistress and a second family – and they have not only inherited half his worldly goods, they also offer a possible route to Kitty's lost daughter. 

What follows is a long way from a conventional crime novel. There are plenty of bodies, but the crime is not murder, it's man's ultimate inhumanity to man: war. There's romance a-plenty, and that does follow a conventional path – boy meets girl, they fall in love, they fall out then forgive each other. In this case girl is Kitty Campbell, boy is Bill Hamilton, a reconnaissance pilot based in Malta. 

Kitty becomes a civilian aircraft plotter, tracking planes in the savage air battles as the Allied and Axis forces vie for supremacy in the Mediterranean. She is party to vital Allied information and plans, and all too conscious of the dangers which lurk around every corner and not only in Malta. She learns that the precious daughter she lost is in hiding, following the deaths of her adoptive parents. 

This is the author's debut novel, and she has clearly learned the value of detailed research. The descriptions of bombed buildings, the sounds, sights and smells of the war-torn streets and air raid shelters, the painstaking accounts of the work of the aircraft plotters all contribute to build a level of tension that at times seems unbearable. The characters, too, are evocative of the era: the upright senior officers, the handsome pilots whose offhand black humour belies both their courage and their apprehension, the plucky young women who do their bit in their own way, of whom Kitty is pluckiest of all.   

We know the Allies won the battle for Malta and the Mediterranean, but the storyline still leaves questions which aren't answered till near the end. Is Kitty right to befriend her father's other family? Will Flying Officer Hamilton, scarred, bloodied but unbowed, survive his most dangerous mission of the war? Above all, will Kitty be reunited with her daughter? You'll race to the end as I did to find out the answers!
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Tracy Cook read history at Oxford University and produced and directed a documentary series for the BBC. She moved into freelance journalism and PR, but her lifelong dream has always been to write. After graduating from the Faber Academy Writing a Novel Course, she was longlisted for the Bridport Novel Prize in 2021. Wings Over Valletta is her first published novel. She lives in Surrey with her husband. 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.