My surfer crew tag was PBC18. My parents said I first ran away from home at two years old. At fourteen I hitch-hiked two thousand miles along the Australian coastline.
My first job was as a graduate intelligence officer, but I quit to write a novel. I went travelling and hitch-hiked across the Sahara and met my wife on the border of Algeria and Niger. Afterwards, I caught a riverboat up the Congo and walked for two weeks across a game park in Tanzania.
On my return, I wrote another novel and laboured for ten years to finish a PhD on Finnegans Wake. Then got a job. As an IT director in London, I commuted five hours a day and in winter never saw the sun. It was the Myth of Sisyphus while wearing a suit. Since then I represented Britain in three Veterans Fencing World Championships. I write on fencing too.
The novels below have rollercoaster plots and the characters will grab you by the lapels and shake you. I write about real yet alien places that exist somewhere quite close to where you live.
THE LYME ROAD SCHOOL SERIES
SHAHEED!
Jahangir is a kid who knows how to make nitroglycerine. Lorelei’s mother is a high-class hostess.
A true grime tale set around Lyme Road School, where everyone except their friend Frank is totally weird. Lyme Road Community School is no ordinary school, servicing a sprawling South London estate. Some of the students are in gangs, some the children of drug addicts, and some are drug dealers themselves. Others are refuges from war-torn countries, and a few were even soldiers. Jahangir’s brother was a Taliban suicide bomber.
Already a ‘person of interest’ to the police, Jahangir becomes the target of local Estate gangstas but, when Lorelei is kidnapped, he and his new friend Frank vow to find her. The problem is, Jahangir has triggered a riot.
Read the Amazon reviews here.
ZERUZERU
A major pop sensation in the United States, Candice is fourteen going on thirty-four and a cocaine abuser. To avoid being taken into protective care, she is sent to live with her uncle in London unaware he is deep undercover unmasking a serial killer.
When Ainslie’s pet rabbit began talking to him, he thought he’d finally discovered a true friend. Or, he had slipped into insanity. Before he can decide which, the school science department transfers Beatrice to an animal research laboratory. He and his friend Frank break in to rescue her.
Ainslie and Candice become entangled in the world of bio-piracy and blood sacrifice, and only Beatrice can help them.
Read the Amazon reviews here.
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