The Rabbit Hunter: The Battle of Greece

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The New Zealand Division arrived in Greece in late March 1941, part of a three division British Commonwealth force, sent in an attempt to dissuade the Germans from invading. Hitler's fascist ally, Mussolini, had failed to subdue Greece and the Italian army was bogged down on the Greco-Albanian border. For Hitler, invasion was imperative, as plans were already set and the clock ticking down to the greatest military aggression in the history of the world, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

In order to clear the troublesome thorn in Hitler's side in the Balkans, 12 German divisions descended on Greece, sweeping aside the army of neutral neighbour, Yugoslavia, and the inadequate allied forces facing them. The Greek nation quickly sued for peace in order to spare the civilian population as its own army was fully engaged with the Italians, causing the British force to scramble for the evacuation beaches.

The book follows the fictional characters of Second Lieutenant Neil Rankin's platoon of citizen soldiers from the South Island of New Zealand, as they dodge and fight their way from the slopes of Mount Olympus south over the Corinth Canal to the port of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. They learn the bitter lessons and cost of war as they go, drawing the reader in, so that their fate becomes the paramount concern in this fast-paced yet convincing debut novel.