Gateway to Hell

MONTE CASSINO, IMPREGNABLE CORE OF THE GERMAN DEFENSES, looming over the most savage battlefield in Italy, stands between the advancing Allies and their goal. Lieutenant Saville’s Assault Engineers and their escort from the crack New Zealand 2nd Division are ordered to destroy a key position in the shadow of the Monastery. None of them can foresee the ferocity of the enemy’s attempts to obstruct them. Cut off, forced to shelter behind the corpses of their comrades, they face the fanatical paratroops of the Hermann Goering Division. With the Paras, pitting his wits against Saville and staking his life on success, is Hauptmann Wolff, the engineer who designed the strongpoint. It is a struggle neither can afford to lose, because whoever holds the Fuehrer Emplacement controls the road to Rome—and the armies are poised for battle.

James Rouch has been a full-time author for thirty years. In that time he has had fourteen books published. Three of them are novels of the Second World War. TIGER, set in Northern France during the breakout from the Normandy beachhead. THE WAR MACHINES, set in North Africa and GATEWAY TO HELL, dealing with the fighting for Monte Cassino in Italy. They were all published in the UK and the USA by major publishers and all went to reprints with translation rights sold in Spain and many other countries. A series of novels entitled THE ZONE has comprised the rest of his output. Again on the subject of war their theme is an alternative near future where the Berlin Wall did not fall. Instead the cold war suffered meltdown. A war across Europe imploded, concentrating itself in a great contaminated swathe of territory slashed across the continent, a huge no-mans land, THE ZONE. He has a passion for helping new writers and has never turned down a request for advice from aspiring authors. That led him to team his writing with acting as a literary agent. A successful start-up was abruptly terminated when an accident cost him part of a leg and subsequent complications curtailed his ability to dash about the book fairs and between publishers. Instead, in order to maintain his contact with new writers, he started a critique service as Author-Management.com. It has proved immensely successful and he finds it meshes perfectly with his writing.