Synopsis

Love is a battlefield.  

The aftershocks of an affair reverberate out to those in the lives of the lovers, who will NOT take it lying down.

Jack Connor’s lives an idyllic life by the Portsmouth seaside married to Caitlin McAllen, a stunning billionaire heiress, and working at his two jobs as the Head of Radar Engineering of Marine Electronics and as the Director of Engineering of McAllen BlackGold, his powerful father-in-law Douglas McAllen’s extreme engineering company in Oil & Gas.  He loves his two sons from his first marriage and is amicably divorced from his beautiful first wife Marianne Connor.  Their delicately balanced lives are shattered when sexy Michelle Williams, with whom Jack is having a secret affair and who is pregnant with his child, is found dead and Jack is arrested on suspicion for the murder.

Jeremy Stone brings London’s top defense attorney, Harry Stavers, to handle his best friend’s defense.

Who is the bald man with the tattoo of a skull seen entering the victim’s house?  Who is “KC” who Caitlin makes secret calls to from a untraceable mobile?  Has powerful Douglas McAllen already killed his daughter’s first partner and is he capable of killing again?  Is Caitlin’s brother Ronnie McAllen’s power struggle with Jack for the control of McAllen Industries so intense that he is prepared to kill and frame his brother-in-law?  Is the divorce from Jack’s first wife as amicable on her part as they believe it to be?  Are his sons prepared to kill for their vast inheritance?  Who are the ghosts from Caitlin’s past in Aberdeen, Scotland haunting the marriage?  What is the involvement of Jack’s manager at Marine Electronics?

The cast of characters is made even more colorful by the supporting entourage: the big Scott and his gang, Hosé and Heineken, who carry out Douglas McAllen’s “troubleshooting;” McAllens’ bumbling solicitors McKinley and Magnus Laird; Caitlin McAllen’s handymen, Cossack and Levent; and Jeremy’s sidekick, the gay black actor working in the London West End.

While Jack is charged and his murder trial proceeds in the Crown Court under barrister Harry Stavers’ expert care, Jeremy runs a race against time to find the real killer and save his friend’s life, if he is in fact innocent, in a tense saga of love, desire, power, and ambition.

Review

The first chapter started off well, the 2nd chapter I had a hard time with and keeping people straight, and then it flowed well again after that. I will say I was NOT expecting the ending! I kept thought about who could have killed Michelle, but the answer wasn’t one I expected.  I will say I missed some of the clues or didn’t think twice about them.  I should pay closer attention!  Oh and for my fellow US residents, it is set in the UK so I had to get used to some different words/spellings, but nothing that took away from the reading, just different that our every day life.

We give this 4 paws and suggest it next time you are looking for a mystery to read….see if you can figure out who did it before the last chapter!

About the Author

Jac Wright is a poet published in literary magazines, a published author, and an electronics engineer educated at Stanford, University College London, and Cambridge who lives and works in England.  Jac studied English literature from the early age of three, developing an intense love for poetry, drama, and writing in Trinity College Speech & Drama classes taken every Saturday for fourteen years, and in subsequent creative writing classes taken during the university years.  A published poet, Jac’s first passion was for literary fiction and poetry writing as well as for the dramatic arts.  You will find these influences in the poetic imagery and prose, the dramatic scene setting, and the deep character creation.

These passions – for poetry, drama, literary fiction, and electronic engineering – have all been lovingly combined to create the first book in the literary suspense series, The Reckless Engineer.  There are millions of professionals in high tech corporate environments who work in thousands of cities in the US, the UK, and the world such as engineers, technicians, technical managers, investment bankers, and corporate lawyers.  High drama, power struggles, and human interest stories play out in the arena every day.  Yet there are hardly any books that tell their stories; there are not many books that they can identify with.  Jac feels compelled to tell their stories in The Reckless Engineer series.

Jac also writes the literary short fiction series, Summerset Tales, in which he explores characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances in the semi-fictional region of contemporary England called Summerset, partly the region that Thomas Hardy called Wessex.  Some of the tales have an added element of suspense similar to Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.  The collection is published as individual tales in the tradition of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales.  The first tale, The Closet, accompanies the author’s first full-length literary suspense title, The Reckless Engineer.

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I was provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review