Books
CHRISTMAS DOLL OVERVIEW
Christmas Day dawned grey and cold. Curt Richardson and Sue-Beth Walters were being pestered by their German Shepherd, Odin, to go for a walk. Whilst the rest of the household slept the widowed couple took the plunge and went out in the cold. It was freezing.
Sue-Beth had been given a pair of smart binoculars, by her landlord, to celebrate the season of goodwill and she could not wait to road-test them. They were not landlord and tenant in the traditional sense, indeed, Curt had torn-up the tenancy agreement well over a year earlier.
As they untangled themselves from an unintentional clench, it just happened, they observed a light aeroplane flying low over a not-too-distant treeline. Sure, it was low but all seemed under control. That is when a shape fell from the sky. It landed in a cover crop of maize.
The woman, clearly under-dressed for the freezing conditions, was dead. Had she already been dead when she left the plane or was it the fall that killed her. Richardson and Walters were involved in national security so took it upon themselves to investigate.
It started a race against time and the weather. The time element was that they had a Christmas dinner date with their great friends, Sean and Amelia Bryant, and the weather element was that snow was forecast. They didn’t imagine for one minute that they would have the case wrapped up in time for dinner but they did. The story of intrigue that emerged would fill them with laughter for many a day to come. A journey to a Norfolk airfield would expose a couple’s imaginative private life that for a chance glance skyward would have remained their secret.
A third wheel on a bike is not always a universally welcome improvement. The use of tomato ketchup knows no limits.
WISH DEAD LIST
My name is John Wells. I am a well decorated former soldier and marine. I have served my country with distinction and honour. My country has now betrayed me when I needed it most. My wife is dead thanks to the pandemic lockdowns and it has made me an angry man. The sainted NHS forgot to diagnose Kate’s cancer returning as they were too busy fighting covid. It cost her her life and now the culprits need to pay for their negligence. I will also hunt down those that crossed Kate and me at various stages of our time together. Then there are those that have not paid the full price for their crimes thanks to our inadequate justice system that seems to favour perpetrators above victims: the terrorist who used a honey-trap to lure a good soldier to his place of execution; the drugged-up thug who tied a rock around a dog’s neck and tossed him into a canal; the head of a social services department that tried to defend the ineptitude of her staff when they allowed a little child to die at the hands of useless parents; and, there are more.
Rosina Ali sat on the horns of a dilemma as she waited at the fence of Kabul airport to board the last plight-flight following the west’s surrender to the Taliban. She opted to let a mother and her two young children go ahead of her. She spent weeks lying low in the Afghan capital. She moved from safe-house to safe-house, some safer than others. Eventually she made the torrid journey through Pakistan and Europe until one dawn she was on a French beach staring at a less than seaworthy RIB. She was forced, at gunpoint, to board the vessel with her compatriots and an undercover British journalist working for a government agency. The next few weeks would see her plunged into the more sordid corners of the dark web.
Rosina would cross paths with Wells with a tragic outcome for one of them. The Home Security Team were tracking Rosina’s every move, oblivious of the mentally disturbed killer on the prowl. Then all paths crossed that of another enquiry led by the National Crime Agency seeking the same perpetrators for different reasons.
Sewn into the intrigue is a plan hatched in Moscow and Beijing to smuggle variants of Covid into the west. They clearly want NATO and it’s allies to have it’s back turned while they plot international nuisance.
A tale of one woman’s bravery, a man’s unhinged drive for vengeance, all set against the profitable trade of people-trafficking into the lucrative unregulated sex industry.
You will never look at allotments in the same way again.
LIONHEART
In 2008 a young Asian Man, Rameez ul Shafiq, after a notorious bust-up on a radio phone-in programme, disappeared from the streets of Burnley, his hometown. He was never heard from again.
Three years later, investigative journalist, Sean Bryant, had just filed copy and was looking forward to an extended break to celebrate his forthcoming wedding anniversary. On the way out of his office building in London he too was abducted in an elaborately planned action. Why? Were he and Rameez linked in any way. On the face of it there was no connection between the two. Or was there?
Against this, a particularly nasty character, Randolph Soames, had been released from prison. Bryant had helped in the conviction of the small-time gangster. As he was led away from the dock to commence his sentence, he issued threats against the journalist and his family as well as the man, a former gang member, who had also helped secure the guilty verdict. It was soon realised that the abduction was too well planned for the armed post office robber to have been involved with. Nonetheless, Soames had disappeared and was still considered a real threat. After all, he had already ordered the successful execution of Bryant’s fellow grass.
Bryant found himself held at a facility in East Anglia where he struck up an unlikely friendship with a former member of staff. Despite the two having never met, although they lived in the same village, Oakshott in Suffolk, the woman had been accused of passing confidential client documents to the journalist. It all came to a head when the pair were sentenced to hang in the facility’s death chamber.
The woman still had friends within the organisation and they were assisted in their successful escape. Arriving back in Oakshott just at the time Soames was stalking the Bryant family they became embroiled in the takedown of the criminal.
That was only the beginning, not the end, of their involvement, though. Co-ordinated terrorist attacks were carried out around Europe. Pictures of some of the terrorists were broadcast on the main news. It was at this time Bryant realised what he had been, unwittingly, drawn into. His fellow escapee, a woman called Sue-Beth Walters, was now key in the tracking down of the group that had been behind the attacks. Now they were working with two members of a fledgling government security organisation, Curt Richardson and Michael Jones, and what they were about to discover would rock them to the core.
A tale of horrific bereavement, political intrigue and murderous thugs would culminate in the unmasking of the man behind the political organisation strongly associated with the attacks.
Seeds of lifelong friend ships were sown during these dark days in Suffolk. Friendships that would endure and blossom.
