WINNER OF THE 2014 CHANTICLEER CLUE AWARD FOR PRIVATE EYE/NOIR FICTION!
Sam Dyke is back! The private investigator who never gives up until the bad guys are caught—or worse.
For Sam, taking this particular case is not promising. His client is a secretary who’s watching her boss fall apart, and she can’t bear it. The case requires subtlety and finesse and so isn’t his usual kind of job. But he likes her and takes it anyway.
And he soon discovers that it’s not the pressures of work that are getting to her boss. It’s his colleagues, a group of cultish scientists. Their leader is a hyper-intelligent seer/visionary who has a personal philosophy that is taking him towards one final act—to produce a calamitous event that will destroy the lives of hundreds of people. Or more.
Dyke sets himself on a course to prevent this madman from achieving his ends. A course that endangers him, his new partner and it seems anyone else who gets in the way of this doomsday plan ...
This is the fourth book in the Sam Dyke Investigations series and was only published in May of 2014. Its current ranking is 195,000 in the Amazon US Kindle store, though it has reached as high as 10,000.
THE NINTH RULE of private detection states that you should never take on a client you think might be nuts.
I wasn’t entirely convinced this was the case with the woman who’d called me that morning, but I was certainly tending that way.
As I walked towards Chatwins, the best bakery in the North West, looking forward to a latte and a slice of Victoria sponge in their tea-room, I warned myself against being a soft touch. She’d asked me to carry a folded newspaper in my left hand and told me I should call her Barbara, though I doubted that was her real name. A certain amount of paranoia in the people you deal with in this job is acceptable, but you can take things too far.
Nevertheless, here I was on a cold Monday lunchtime in Crewe, my leather jacket pulled up around my ears and a copy of The Guardian stuffed under my left arm. If nothing else I wanted to see what she looked like. She’d sounded as though she’d been talking to me from a cupboard with her hand over the mouthpiece and her eyes wide and staring. My kind of client.
I crossed the street and was about to open the bakery’s door when another customer opened it from the inside and slipped out, holding it ajar. I went through gratefully and was murmuring a word of thanks when she said, ‘Costa Coffee, fifteen minutes.’
I had the presence of mind to nod and then continue inside without looking at her. I knew she was slim and dark-haired, a little taller than the average. She’d kept her face turned away from me so I got nothing else except a whiff of floral perfume.
Once inside I joined the queue for bread and bought a brown loaf. Most of the customers were older women and I felt as though they’d all seen the playlet at the door and weren’t fooled.
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Esraa Osama and Cinthia Lestrange
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Author review: Esraa and Mascarell were very easy to work with and provided an excellent translation. They communicated with me very clearly and produced a book which is well-formatted and has been made to a professional standard. I would recommend them to anyone. Thank you, ladies! |
