How long can the past be kept secret?
It is a time of austerity. Financial cuts are biting hard and the once great City of Liverpool finds itself now almost bankrupt. At the eleventh hour funding is found in the form of enigmatic billionaire Kirk Bovind, a religious zealot, determined to change the moral and religious fibre of his old hometown and bringing salvation to the streets.
So when a man disappears without trace solitary lawyer, Erasmus Jones, agrees to track down missing Stephen, but quickly discovers that this is more than just a missing person case. Men are being brutally murdered across the city and Erasmus suspects the deaths are all linked.
As the search for Stephen grows and the ripples from the past begin to spread Erasmus has to ask himself whether Bovind could be behind the killings or if someone is trying to frame him and weaken the strangle hold he has over the city?
Who will be the next to die...?
Guest Post
‘Donald Trump has made thriller writer’s jobs so much harder’ Phil Kurthausen talks fiction and real life
A billionaire American politician who uses his power and wealth to gain high office and then imposes an authoritarian regime seemed possible but unlikely when I first started writing the Silent Pool. So, I made him larger than life, or so I thought.
My billionaire, an old man with the plastic stretched face of a much younger man wants to impose a religious grip on an English city, bought, sold and then sponsored by his company. The only person who stands between him and his fanatical plans is an ex-military lawyer, old soak and indie music lover, Erasmus Jones who discovers secrets that tie the billionaire to dark crimes committed a generation ago.
My billionaire has terrifying associates, a disregard for the law and the cold vision of a demagogue who always gets his own way.
Skip forward a few years and the next leader of the free world is a billionaire turned politician with perhaps even a more scary vision than my antagonist. There doesn’t seem to be a plan, words, some threats but less a plan and more the scream of the ID, a child’s petulant lashing out and that makes things uncertain and has there ever been anything scarier than the monster you only glimpse in the dark or the blankness of a psychopath’s rage?
Who knows what will happen with him and that makes us scared. Larger than life indeed and yet character so underwritten at the same time. He is a writer’s worst nightmare; I suspect even Ian Fleming would have hesitated writing Donald Trump as a Bond villain.
What Donald Trump has done has rendered all of us who write good (we hope) villains with a problem. What do we do when real life throws up drama worthy of fiction? Well, in my case you make the stakes higher, and a plot to unseat you just when you think you can see what’s coming. Read in bed with the lights off and I promise your nightmares won’t be of Donald Trump.
About the author:
Phil Kurthausen was brought up in Merseyside where he dreamt of being a novelist but ended up working as a lawyer. He has travelled the world working as a flower salesman, a light bulb repair technician and, though scared of heights, painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ken Dodd once put him in a headlock for being annoying.
He has had work broadcast on BBC radio 4 extra, published some short stories and his novel ‘The Killing Pool’ won the Thriller Round in the Harper Collins People’s Novelist Competition broadcast on ITV in November 2011 and appeared in the final. It was later shortlisted for the Dundee International Literary Prize in 2012. He lives in Chester.
He has had work broadcast on BBC radio 4 extra, published some short stories and his novel ‘The Killing Pool’ won the Thriller Round in the Harper Collins People’s Novelist Competition broadcast on ITV in November 2011 and appeared in the final. It was later shortlisted for the Dundee International Literary Prize in 2012. He lives in Chester.
Website: www.philkurthausen.com
Giveaway: The giveaway is for a £10 Amazon gift card (UK ONLY) and to have a character named after the winner in Phil Kurthausen's next book. It is for one winner. Giveaway start date: 12th December - 19th December
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