If you're into Okker adventure The Abrupt Physics of Dying by Paul Hardisty (Orenda Books) R220Hardisty is a bit of a bloke's bloke - sailor, pilot, keen outdoorsman, Ironman tri-athlete and deeply involved in conservation in Western Australia. He is rather like Claymore Straker, the hero of his enjoyable romp of a debut. Straker's working for an oil company in Yemen and trying to forget a violent past when he is kidnapped by jihadists and finds himself caught between secret police goons and terror groups. Then he meets Rania, a troubled South African journalist, and it is all watch out, Wilbur Smith. A furiously paced eco-thriller with a sequel already in the, uh, pipeline.The issueAmong other releases, the 70th anniversary of World War 2's end in Europe - May 8 is VE Day - is being marked by two acclaimed histories of the Nazi camps, If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück, Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm and KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann (both Little, Brown). Books on the subject, admittedly, feel a little voyeuristic, tapping into our fascination with humanity's propensity for cruelty. But journalist Helm's work - based in part on interviews with survivors - has been noted for its sensitivity, while the scholar Wachsmann's work is more academic and serious.It is his book that critics are suggesting is going to be the definitive work on the konzentrationslagers, bringing, as it does, new life to a familiar, appalling subject. Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis did not have a clear programme for the camps; there was much hasty improvisation within weeks of taking power in 1933. We tend to think of them as extermination centres for Jews and other minorities, but most were labour camps and most inmates were not Jewish. And they were far from secret: Initially many Germans believed they were necessary evils to detain "enemies of the state" who threatened public order. In time, though, their function did become more lethal and anti-Semitic.There never was a single model - some were prisons, others factories and slave camps. Some, like Ravensbrück, also doubled as grotesque medical laboratories. Here starved and beaten women - housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes - were forcibly sterilised and endured unbelievably cruel experiments.At first, most inmates were Polish. Then they were French, Dutch, Russian. Some were physically and mentally disabled. Some were Gypsies, and a minority were Jewish. "It was obviously a place of death," one survivor recalled. "We had a sense of entering an abattoir." Horrifyingly, their ordeal did not end with Ravensbrück's liberation - within days, the women were being raped by the Russian soldiers who had supposedly freed them.The bottom line"[It] isn't a fluke. It is a return to normal, an ecological homeostasis." - Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World by Brooke Borel (The University of Chicago Press)..