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Hello and welcome to this episode of Cold War Conversations.

I'm delighted to welcome award-winning author David Young, who has written the Starzy Child Karen

Muller series of crime thrillers set in East Germany in the mid-1970s. Shortlists review of Starzy

Child reads, Can't Get Enough of Cold War Germany afterland 83, this is your latest reading companion.

There will be links to all of the books in the show notes at Cold Warconversations.com

and I'm delighted to say I've read and enjoyed them all. We welcome David Young.

Hello David. Hello, Ian. Thanks very much for inviting me on. Well, no. No, it's great to

have you on. How are you today? Yeah, I'm doing well. I had a book event in East Grinstead

yesterday evening, which I took my Vartburg police car along to, and unfortunately it broke down on the

way. So that was a bit of a disaster. Oh dear. Well, more about your Vartburg police car later. Keep the

listeners agreed, David. Yes. No. So can you just tell us about yourself and how you became an author?

Yes, certainly. Yes, so I write a crime fiction series set in East Germany in the mid-1970s.

It started with Stasi Child and then the second book was Starzy

Wolf and then more recently at the start of this year, the third book, A Darker States.

I've been a, or I was a journalist for more than 25 years with the BBC and then before that

working in local newspapers. But I've had

enough of the BBC and the BBC has had enough of me and I decided to try and find a second

career and to be honest, journalists don't have that many transferable skills

um i suppose unless you work in financial journalism and you know how to play the stock market

...