FEBRUARY 1942: The Struma, a broken-down steamer, explodes and sinks in the Black Sea, drowning 768 Rumanian Jews fleeing the Nazis and heading for Palestine, and safety.
JUNE 1944: Thirty-one SAS soldiers are captured behind enemy lines and are forced to dig their own graves before being shot and buried in a forest in the heart of France.
SEVENTY YEARS LATER: A young woman is attacked in the grounds of Edinburgh Zoo – the attacker seeking the document that might link these two wartime events.
Private Investigator Sam Dyke rescues the woman, Chantal Bressette, and embarks on a quest to find out why the document she carries is being sought by a high-ranking Government official and his team of ex-Army thugs. They follow a series of clues that lead them eventually to an isolated village in central France, tracked by the thugs and government minister Gideon Blake, who becomes obsessed with uncovering what the document reveals because he believes it implicates his family in an obscene war-crime.
The Hard Swim is the third in Keith Dixon's series of Sam Dyke Investigations.
If you like fast-moving thrillers in the vein of The Day of the Jackal, the Jason Bourne movies and Lee Child's Jack Reacher, then you'll love The Hard Swim.
The Hard Swim is the third book in the Sam Dyke Investigations series and sells about 50 copies per month. It's currently at 197,000 in the Amazon US Kindle store, all genres.
HE HAD WANTED to take her with him, but now he would have to kill her.
There were too many people around and they were too close. And they were all translators – they could call for help in over twenty languages.
Connell Steele, who was not without a sense of humour, grinned to himself. Although the concept of evil was one in which he didn’t believe, he recognised that others would think it a wicked act to kill someone so obviously undeserving.
But at this point in his career he didn’t care. His experience had taught him that everyone had an agenda and it was not his job to understand this woman’s. He was being paid a fee and, most of the time, he told himself that that was all the moral indemnity he required.
The Conference of European Translators was being held for the first time in the Mansion House of Edinburgh Zoo, a grand Victorian pile that stood at the top of contoured grounds like a stern overseer and looked down on a wide and unexpected collection of exotic animals. Conferences were held most days in the Mansion House unknown to the gaggles of visitors who wandered around the zoo below.
The target had arrived an hour previously and had engaged in a raging and bitter argument with a uniformed guard in the entrance foyer. The guard had been sufficiently cowed – or pissed-off – that he had made a phone call, glancing suspiciously at her all the while from beneath his peaked cap. The target had then spoken to the stiff-looking woman who had arrived, striding purposefully in a pencil skirt across the lobby, and had eventually been allowed to walk up to the Mansion House itself, accompanied by the guard.
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Nicole de Lucena Menegollo
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Author review: Nicole was very prompt with her translation and easy to talk to about it. She was very adaptable and we worked well together. Would recommend her to anybody! |
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Samantha Sugey Priego Morales
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