Fans of Philip Kerr's revered Bernie Gunther novels take note - Pastor, an excellent writer of historical fiction, is giving Kerr a run for his money with her detective, Major Martin Bora, who, like Gunther, is a good man at odds with the world. THRILLER OF THE WEEKTin Sky by Ben Pastor (Bitter Lemon Press) R220In Bora's case, he is a devout Catholic and a professional soldier in Hitler's Wehrmacht. In this, the fourth in the Bora series, after Lumen, Liar Moon and A Dark Song of Blood, it is 1943 in the Ukraine and Bora investigates the murder of two captured Russian generals.THE ISSUEThe short answer to the question in the title of Stephen Witt's acclaimed How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime? (Vintage) is that the recording industry all but dies. The New Yorker carried an extract in April and the UK Sunday papers raved about it at the weekend and were especially impressed that Witt had managed to find music piracy's so-called "patient zero": Bennie Lydell Glover, an employee at a Universal CD pressing plant in North Carolina who stole an estimated 2000 albums between 1999 and 2007 and uploaded them on the internet before their official releases. Thanks to Napster, the file-sharing platform, Glover was, according to Witt, "the world's leading leader of pre-release music".Napster lasted barely two years, but at its peak, before it was shut down by the US courts, it had more than 70million registered accounts, with users sharing more than 2billion MP3 files a month. No one bought music any more, save for "losers over 30".The loss in revenue obviously hurt the industry and cost jobs. Lots of jobs. There are many characters in Witt's book who can't be named for fear that unemployed factory workers will hunt them down and do them great harm.Interestingly, Witt describes himself as one of those at "the forefront of the download trend", and estimates that between 1997 and 2005 he amassed some 1500GB of music - about 15000 albums - on his hard drive without paying a cent.The Observer asked him if he considered piracy a crime, and he answered: "Legally, there's no question, it's illegal. But the question is: morally, is it wrong? And to what extent do you want government and large corporations to limit our ability to reproduce things on the internet? 'What rights do we have?' is the real question." Asked if he bought his music now, he replied, "I pay for Spotify."Perhaps we should all steal Witt's book, or more fashionably, just rip it in digital format and give it away free to whoever wants it. Either way, it deserves a huge audience.THE BOTTOM LINE"They wanted his name, not his brain." - Einstein: His Space and Times by Steven Gimbel (Yale)..