Charles has an extraordinary biography, even for a wartime fox. A secret agent in France, he's been evacuated from Dunkirk – but in a galling moment, had to leave his French cousin and his colleagues behind. Since that nightmare he's retired – and somehow done just enough to keep him in prison rather than a trench somewhere. But that is about to change, as he will have to undergo one of those One Last Mission occasions – smuggle a code-breaker into a castle where there're secret Nazi plans, get them decrypted, get the message back to London. The only thing is the nature of his companion – for she's a chicken. And what, in a time of wartime truce, has Charles been doing to keep him in jail? Why, eating chickens, of course.

Being a bit out of the loop as to which celebrity had written which kids book, this surprised me at being this author's seventh. But it was certainly an intriguing set-up. The nature of using fantasy animal armies to portray the real drama of WWII was a potential stumbling block, for one. But this was better than you might fear. Sure, it's not a classic. The French soldier animals all speak like British animals might, with some token fragments of loosely-remembered French GCSE added to them. The contrivance with which the animals' story is always intertwined with that of the same human squaddie-turned-Special-Ops-Commando is, well, contrived. And the moments of slapstick in the plot don't quite fit in.

But there is a strong sense of this being a very decent read. The plot certainly moves along well – this is not a long piece, but it's one that packs a lot of drama in. If it launches a series it does it quietly – not desperately setting things up, but concentrating on this story and just this story, and not labouring over the world-building to the detriment of the action. And ultimately its heart is in the right place as regards presenting the war – as clumsy as this may be as regards fitting in animal soldiers, fighting their own parallel war, while ignoring the real use of military animals by humans, this is no shoddy cash-in. It's a good, four-star read.

Dermot has a great writing style and his books always bring the lols. I really enjoyed reading this and I think it’ll be a hit with kids who love a bit of adventure too!

Can a crafty fox and a genius chicken complete an epic rescue mission... without one of them getting eaten?

A new fun-filled book from Dermot o’Leary, my son is a big fan of the Toto series so we were very much looking forward to reading this new book.
The illustrations are wonderful and really add to the story, (however we found the formatting in the ebook challenging) I definitely think they would be more impactful when we read the paper copy.

For us, this wasn’t quite at the same pace and fun of Toto but we still enjoyed it.