Colonel Kurt Richter is a Canadian Army officer who has also seen extensive special operations forces service including tours with the US Army Special Forces, the British Special Air Service Regiment and the Canadian Joint Task Force 2 He is a looser and more carefree individual primarily because he has a wealthy family background (breweries) and at the beginning of the series has just returned from six months of convalescence after being wounded in Afghanistan. While not physically debilitated he believes that his wounds will restrict him from any further command positions. As such he readily accepts working for Sambrook and eventually ends up as a principal staff officer at Sambrook’s headquarters where he acts as a character foil for Sambrook, a source of input on foreign military knowledge and a general troubleshooter of problems plaguing the command.

At the beginning of the series, Kurt has been amicably divorced from his wife (Toni), who currently lectures at a university in Canada on the psychology of terrorists. She has a recurring role as a consultant on psychological matters. Their daughter (Tara) is in high school as well but as the series progresses joins the Canadian Army Reserves as an infantryman and later takes a tour in Afghanistan as the gunner on a LAV-3 (light armored vehicle). Richter enters into a loose romantic relationship with Sambrook’s sister.

In addition other foreign characters, Afghan, Australian, British, and German have minor roles and, as such, each of the stories make use of several international locales.

The genre of the Allies books is military fiction. The theme is Allies and is set in the background of Canada’s and the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan over the last decade. It should be noted that while the books all include military operations they are not war stories per se (Anaconda, a prequel novella, is the exception to this). The intent is that each story deals with some issue or event that requires investigation. In this respect one could say that the stories follow a mystery sub-genre.

That leads us to the Mark Winters, CID novels. While Article 15 investigations and Boards of Inquiry took me so far, my interest has always gravitated more to good detective stories. Much of that has probably to do with my love of John Sandford's fascinating Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers books and Michael Connelly's excellent Bosch series.

The Mark Winters, CID books allowed me to expand the Allies characters into the field of military police procedurals by virtue of the fact that both US Special Operations Command and US Central Command in Tampa Florida are served by the Lakeland Criminal Investigation Command Office out of Lakeland Florida. Lakeland CID (par to the Fort Benning CID Battalion) has jurisdiction over all felony level investigations for the Florida Peninsula.

CWO2 Mark Winters is the Special Agent-in-Charge of the Lakeland office of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and enters the series in the fourth book, Allies: The Bay. He has progressed through the military police ranks as a competent investigator meriting the command of an independent albeit small office. At the beginning he is an unknown quantity to Phil and Kurt and must prove his abilities.

As the series progresses, his responsibilities grow as the office expands in size but so do the challenges in the form of a domineering mother-in-law that threatens to tear him and his wife (Kristin) and infant son (Max) apart and a new supervisor who has other ambitions for who should run Lakeland.

Originally, Winters was a one-of, but his story was well received and he now seems to have taken the focus.