A Great Day

Wendy and I had a lovely day at the Expat Woman Christmas Fair, held at the Dubai Polo & Equestrian Club on Saturday. Book sales went well, the sun shone (well, it tends to in the UAE) and we met some lovely people.

Bomber Boys

Although I finished the first draft of Bomber Boys in January, it's taken me until May to finish editing it. Now at last it's available on Kindle (via Mauve Square Publishing) with the paperback to follow.

Hope you enjoy it!

Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story

Bill Price, journalist and former RAF officer suffers devastating head injuries in a car crash, causing him to experience vivid hallucinations. So when he sees signal flares and shadowy figures while out walking on the disused airfield at Leckonby in Lincolnshire, he believes them to be a product of his own mind.

The airfield is to be developed for housing, but work is disrupted by what appears to be paranormal activity. Ghostly airmen are seen and lights appear in the ruined control tower.

Bill investigates the story for his newspaper and despite his logic telling him that such things cannot happen, events take a nightmarish turn when he finds himself caught up in the life of a Bomber Command squadron in 1944.

In a cruel twist of fate, he realises that not only is the past haunting him, but he is haunting the past, and so begins his desperate struggle to return to the safety of the present day.

Special Offer - The Manhattan Deception now only $0.99 on Amazon

As part of an upcoming promotional campaign, The Manhattan Deception is now available for only $0.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store. More details to follow...

Finally Finished Book #5

Months later than I'd hoped, I've finally finished the first draft of book number 5 - probably going to be called Bomber Boys - A Ghost Story.

I'd hoped to have it ready to catch the Ghost Story for Christmas market. Ghost Story for Sometime Around Easter doesn't really have the same ring to it. Still, it was great fun writing it and now comes all the boring stuff like editing, proof reading, coming up with a blurb etc.

I'm still not sure what my next project's going to be. I've started a detective novel set during the reign of Richard III, but the scope of the research, let alone finding time to write is a bit daunting now that I'm back to working full-time and some more. The other alternative, depending on how well Bomber Boys goes, is to write another ghost story.

Here's the first couple of paragraphs. Hope this short excerpt whets your appetite...

Chapter One

My eyesight is fading – just like the rest of me. Darkness is closing in, its fingers pulling me ever deeper; so deep that no one will ever see or hear me again. Even writing these words is draining what little strength remains to me. No more access to a computer, just the agony of pushing a pencil stub across the pages of yet another exercise book. How many books on the pile now? Too many to count, but the fact that you are reading this means that someone has found and transcribed what I have written. Too late for me of course, but at least the truth will now be told. Not just my story – my passing won’t even make the footnotes of history – but the story of men who died for something they cared about, something that those who came after seem to have forgotten.

If this sounds like talking in riddles I quite understand. A few months ago I would have felt the same way. Logic, common sense and science tell us such things cannot happen. That’s what I thought too, until it happened to me.

Let me explain so that you can avoid my fate.

New Book on the Way (so's Christmas...)

"Work is the curse of the writing classes," as Karl, the unfunny Marx Brother, probably never said.

Happenstance and a big blue aeroplane have conspired together to find me working in Abu Dhabi, hence the infrequence of posts on what was already a fairly thinly populated blog. That said, I'm just coming to the end of a wonderful 2-week holiday at our home in France and have managed to make good progress on my ghost story, Bomber Boys, which is set around a disused airfield in Lincolnshire. All being well, I hope to have finished it before too long.

As I'd hoped, The Manhattan Deception is selling steadily in the USA, so all I need now is to reach a point where it starts to go viral on the interweb. Sadly, until it does, it's back to the day job as toad under the harrow in residence.

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (and a Free Offer)

As many industry insiders expected, Michael Lewis's new book about high-frequency trading, Flash Boys, has caused a media storm and has also reignited another round of not entirely unjustified banker-bashing.

What caught me by surprise was how few people knew this stuff was going on. Entire conferences, trade publications and acres of internet pages are devoted to such topics as microsecond-level wire-to-wire trade latency (nanosecond-level isn't far off either), dark-pools, flash trading, paying for order flow etc and the impact all this stuff has on market micro-structures, liquidity and price formation (not to mention the sale of yachts, white powder from Latin America and houses in the Hamptons).

I guess the people who were already in the know, (including all the regulators and governments who are now falling over themselves with righteous indignation that such things were going on but nobody, y'know like reeeally told them how bad it was) were either ok with it, didn't fully understand the implications, didn't care or simply filed it under "meh, too difficult, didn't read".

According to stories elsewhere on the interweb, movie companies are engaged in a bidding war for the film rights of Flash Boys.... short pause to indulge in a spot of gum gnashing, gut wrenching envy and resentment... Where was I? Ah, yes, that was it, if you find reading about these kinds of techno misdemeanours to your taste, then you'll just lurrve The Minerva System. Click here for a link to the Kindle version The Minerva System

D'you know, I'm very tempted to put the Kindle version on free offer for a few days to see what happens. Yup, free, as in completely gratis - that's got to be a good deal, hasn't it?

Free eBook

From 11 Dec to 13 Dec inclusive, The Minerva System can be downloaded for free from Amazon. And if you enjoy The Minerva System, you'll love Death to Bankers, my latest book, recently published by Mauve Square Publishing.