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Operation Vivienne
Harry Maxwell is a 47-year-old career detective who is reaching the end of his service when he is seconded to Papua New Guinea. After a few months in the highlands of that country, dealing with tribal murders, rapes and robberies, he is transferred to Port Moresby with other ex-pats to devise and deliver detective training. However, almost immediately, he is sent back to the highlands to investigate PNG’s first armed robbery and additionally, possible police corruption and rumours of heroin production.
The investigation is fast-moving but complicated by the impending arrival of his girlfriend from the UK. Ably assisted by national detectives, the action moves to remote jungle areas of the country as well as desert islands in the South Pacific, where he is chased by criminal gangs that might be headed by a Nazi from World War II. It escalates to a new level, moving to Orpheus Island, then Sydney, and reaches an apparent nemesis in Hong Kong.
Harry seems to court trouble.
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Out of Hours
A series of events takes us away from our quiet Welsh seaside town, Barry Island, to several countries across Europe. Aided by London’s notorious East End gangster, Bootsie Burns, and Isobelle Omerta, who runs her West End escort agency to help us recover our stolen diamonds back from Romanian criminals on the Isle of Dogs with brutal consequences.
A chance meeting in Milan with Jacques Couture’s friend, Oralik Kalashnikov, both ex French Foreign Legionnaires, Oralik proposes a daring heist on the Musée du Louvre. But there are obstacles to overcome first. Testing times call for drastic measures and our gang is going to be tested to their limits as situations start to spiral out of control crossing paths with a Russian mafia boss.
Myself, Bernie, Mick nor Melody with her narcissistic behaviours which are becoming progressively more pronounced couldn’t have prepared ourselves or foretold how these events would unfold over the coming year to the extent that we would have to go too to gain what most of us love the most, money. In these series of enduring events that will emotionally detach each of us from our civilised society with each of our lives becoming more infested, more barbaric, more bizarre with each unexpected turn of events and the extreme lengths that we will have to go to hold onto our freedom, our sanity, our morals, ethics and principles that will strain, drain, frighten, sicken and at times demoralise our very souls as they will yours.
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Prince of Wales Lane, SC3
When a young French student had parked his old, dented 2CV, in front of an estate agency in a small seaside town on the East coast of England, he had an absent-minded look at the properties on offer in the window. When he realised how ridiculously low the asking price of a grand palatial house was, he walked in, asked to view the house, and bought it on an impulse, to the shocked horror of his mother and friends. Little could he guess that he was hopping into a trap that would cause him to be followed by the police in several countries, and even offer him an opportunity to discover what it was like to be remanded in custody, all that without ever realising what he was wanted for. Meanwhile, he had made friends for life in the town, and would never be able to stay very long away from his family, his friends, his lovely house, his job a couple of miles down the road, or the local garden fête.
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Psychopath in Town!
Skeletal remains are found under the town’s sports ground goalpost. Young Wallis Brown, who is the daughter of a police sergeant now deceased, meets Sergeant Sam Watson. He tells Wallis of a psychopath in town. Her long-time friend Cherie Winters is bashed by her husband Neil Winters, who blames Wallis for his job loss and marriage break-down. Wallis discovers a man’s body: Sam says “Stay home at night!” Police hunt to arrest Neil for murder. Wallis, now fearful for her life, runs the short way home through the dimly lit laneway. A man wearing a cap is running after her with a knife! She screams and then falls into oblivion.
£6.99 -
Rame
This gripping story is set in the secretive, dark days of smuggling Cornwall. One family falls foul of the violent men who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Dom, his friends and family are caught up in the deadly rivalry of the two connected villages. Murder and mystery threaten their challenging lives where even the sea can be an unpredictable rival. However, when a deadly plague occurs, it is a force beyond their control; all are endangered; none are safe. In the final conflict can love overcome hatred or will violence and greed destroy love?
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Redemption
When cyber security expert Jack Neild goes missing in London it appears to be a straightforward missing person’s case. As the situation unfolds, Justin Kell’s sighting of an adversary from his past makes it clear that kidnap and organised crime are involved.
With the authorities struggling to make progress in finding Neild and suspicion of a critical event with a global implication increasing, Kell puts his relationship with his longstanding girlfriend on the line as he becomes central to the investigation.
When information from an unexpected source changes the dynamic of the operation, and with the body count increasing, the security services make their move, but will it be too late?
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Rogue Justice
Someone disillusioned with the criminal justice system has decided that there is only one option available to prevent the scales of justice from tilting in favour of those that carry out heinous crimes. Believing the system broken, he ruthlessly dispenses his own brand of retribution.
Cutting a swathe through a rural community, he subjects his hapless preys to unimaginable cruelty in twisted games of cat and mouse before executing them in escalating brutality.
Detectives Englund and Hicks are tasked with tracking down a killer amidst their close-knit community, seemingly without motive.
When a young girl is kidnapped, coinciding with the release of a notorious paedophile, Englund is forced to evaluate his own position and question what justice really means.
Will Englund and the enigmatic Hicks catch the killer before the town implodes and takes justice into its own hands?
Or will they become another statistic in an ever-increasing body count?
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Running for His Lives
Dennis ‘Dutch French’ was determined to rid himself of the nightmare memories of his childhood; orphaned as an infant when his father was killed in action, his mother’s subsequent suicide had a profound effect. Constant bullying and humiliation, combined with a disadvantaged lifestyle throughout his early years, caused his behaviour to deteriorate and cause concern. However, all was to change when, following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Army, immediately enhancing his life. Due to an unusual but fortunate assignment, he meets and marries Melanie. During years of happy marriage and a long, distinguished military career, a number of near-death experiences fuel an inward belief regarding the myth of nine lives. His sought-after peace is subsequently shattered when his wife is viciously assaulted and raped, triggering a series of fatal events, changing their lives forever.
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Second Chances - Book 2
Mike Davis, who is the star of the story, starts to find his faith as he starts to get back to his Christian roots. He starts to remember what his parents taught him when he was young. He also struggles to figure out a way by which to come to terms with the gang that is after him and friend Kathy, who he is hoping will soon be more than a friend. As Mike starts to renew his faith, he will have to decide the best way in which to deal with the gang that is after him, and talk to Kathy about what he hopes will progress their relationship.
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Secrets in the Attic
Dame Henrietta Copeland in her new role as private investigator finds herself outsmarted by thieves at the local garage sale, when she attends incognito, is wrapped up in a curtain and delivered to a cliff edge, left to perish.
And while it seems like a wild goose chase, she is stalked by an associate of a suspected murdered/suicide victim, who seems to be getting hot under the collar with Henrietta’s enquiries.
She is constantly reprimanded by the magistrate for overstepping the boundaries of the law, while solving cases.
Her devoted family are appalled to find she is befriending an ex-prisoner, the very person who forced her to sell her beloved paddle wheeler after being disgraced for wildlife poaching on the Mighty River Murray.
Undeterred by adversity Henrietta travels to Perth in Western Australia, to assist her prisoned nephew and unwittingly discovers a diamond heist and to Mount Gambier in the Southeast of South Australia seeking a stolen herbal rose formula and inadvertently while sipping tea on her way back to Goolwa, through the Coorong, uncovers a love nest, the cause of an infidelity which she had refused to uncover at the beginning of her new career. There is personal tragedy when news breaks out of the sinking of the paddle wheeler Beatrice Lonsdale, formerly Laurel Wreath which had been moored at Pier 15 on the Goolwa wharf.
There are surprises and disappointments as Henrietta strives to make a living keeping secrets in the attic.
£11.99 -
Shoot for the Face
Jason Rogers couldn’t remember the last time he had slept soundly. After surviving 20 years in the high-octane world of Russian investment banking, he knew that his time there as the high-flying international banker to the oligarchs was coming to an end.
The bank he’d built from scratch in the 90s, Falcon Capital, his pride and joy, was being assailed on all sides by shadowy forces in Russian society with impeccable government connections, the “siloviki”. To compound matters, his chief risk officer had approved a loan to an oligarch, Ari Kandinskiy, who was down on his luck and had all but gone broke. His efforts to recover desperately needed funds from the stricken oligarch would pit him against powerful interests in Moscow – including Ruslan Akhmatov, the mercurial emissary of Russia’s most troublesome regional governor.
Desperate times would call for desperate measures. Jason Rogers would have to call one final time on the services of Dmitry Ovchinnikov, the Siberian hitman who was a little rough around the edges and dressed like an American cowboy – but who had proved so terribly effective at neutralising his client’s enemies over the years and despatching them to cemeteries all over Russia.
Dmitry Ovchinnikov’s capacity for violence and appetite for dispensing his own, unique brand of “justice” would result in some of Moscow’s most bloody executions in recent memory. It would trigger an orgy of revenge killings which would see the body parts of prominent members of the Russian underworld scattered all over the white tablecloths of that city’s finest restaurants.
Would Jason Rogers come to regret the murderous gang war that he had unleashed on the streets of Moscow? Would he become one of its victims?
Only time would tell…
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Some Service to the State
The year is 1925. In the borderlands of a newly partitioned Ireland, a doctor new to Northern Ireland begins a search for a missing patient, a young girl who has fallen pregnant.
Meeting a wall of silence, she enlists the help of a local, a former IRA volunteer recently released from jail. Their enquiry brings them into contact with a community still suffering from the wounds of civil war. More worrying for them, they find they are beginning to rattle skeletons that some powerful people would prefer went undisturbed.
As they slowly begin to unravel the truth of the girl’s fate, they find that the traces they are following lead to some crimes more monstrous that they ever previously considered.
“Some Service to the State is a superb book with dialogue that would not be out of place on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. Mick McAlinden is a former IRA man caught on the wrong side of the border and the wrong side of history: a law student who ends up working in an abattoir. Aidan McQuade has created a character whose travails highlight the thwarted dreams and the tragedy of partition for so many people in post-revolutionary Ireland.”
- Ronan McGreevy, journalist and author of Great Hatred: the Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson.
“Like Graham Greene, Dennis Lehane, and Louise Penny before him, McQuade takes the humble crime story and uses it like a scalpel to probe and expose the darkness in human souls and human society.”
- Martin W. Sandler, National Book Award-winning author and historian.
“The sparring sparky dialogue is a delight and never fails to vivify the darkness. McQuade shows prodigious skill in shining a spotlight on the scandal of mother-and-baby homes and in brilliantly imbuing the past with his own potent blend of heart, soul and wit.”
- Rosemary Jenkinson, multi-award winning playwright and author of Marching Season.
£9.99