Written by John Steele
|
Today, I am delighted to welcome to my blog, with a guest post entitled Barrel of a Gun, crime thriller writer John Steele.
John's latest novel, Rat Island, is on a blog tour organised by Rachel of Rachel's Random Resources. You can follow the tour with these bloggers:
John's latest novel, Rat Island, is on a blog tour organised by Rachel of Rachel's Random Resources. You can follow the tour with these bloggers:
The blurb:
Rat Island'A REAL CONTENDER FOR CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR' David Peace
'FANS OF DON WINSLOW WILL LOVE THIS' Claire McGowan
New York, 1995. Cop Callum Burke arrives in New York from Hong Kong, drafted in as part of an international investigation into organised crime.
With the handover of Hong Kong to China only a couple of years away, gangsters are moving their operations out of the territory and into New York ahead of the looming deadline.
Burke’s experiences with East Asian crime and the Triads’ links to the Irish Mob make him the perfect man to send in undercover.
But as he infiltrates these vast and lethal criminal networks, bodies start to pile up in his wake and his conscience threatens to send him over the edge.
And when Burke’s NYPD handlers push him to continue the investigation at all costs, he may have to cross the line from cop to criminal just to stay alive…
Readers of Don Winslow, Michael Connelly, Steve Cavanagh, Richard Price and John Sandford will love this dark and morally complex novel which presents a searing portrait of mid-1990s New York as you’ve never seen it before.
PRAISE FOR RAT ISLAND AND JOHN STEELE:
'A nonstop thrill ride... a lyrical, super read filled with plenty of intrigue, action and suspense and sent against an exotic and seldom explored corner of crime fiction' Gerald Posner
'RAT ISLAND speeds and thrashes with the dangerous energy of the Manhattan streets which are so vividly recalled' Gary Donnelly
'John Steele writes with grit, pace and authenticity' Claire McGowan
Crime Thriller
Barrel Of A Gun by John Steele
Have you ever felt totally alone?
I’m not asking if you’ve been alone: have you felt alone – the kind of alone that sends a chill through your body and leaves you feeling so fragile and vulnerable you could snap into a thousand pieces with a stiff breeze?
I’ve been there a couple of times. The once in my life when I ended up in handcuffs, in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, in the wee small hours of the morning; lost in Tokyo with no money or Japanese as the clock ticked toward 2 a.m.; on a New York street at midnight with nowhere to stay as the city churned around me, oblivious and uncaring.
All three of these examples happened to me in the middle of the night, and all three occurred thousands of miles away from my home. Home, then, was Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I was born and bred. I left in 1995, then again in 1997, and haven’t lived there since.
As a kid in Belfast, I was steeped in stories. Bedtime books from my mum, folk stories and made-up epics from my dad. So, a few years ago with my home now England and my own family around me, I decided to write my own. The first was Ravenhill, the story of a man who left his hometown years previously, returns and finds he no longer fits. Next came Seven Skins, a thriller set in London featuring Irish, American and Albanian players, none of whom called the city home. I followed that with Dry River, about a man lost in Japan, surrounded by yakuza gangsters, fighting to rescue his friends from mysterious kidnappers.
I write stories about outsiders, immigrants and people who feel alone, struggling to overcome the odds, or, often, simply survive.
And for me, a group of people who often, as an occupational hazard, feel alone are police officers. I have much first-hand experience of interacting with police (the handcuffs excepted, usually pretty benign) and it never fails to fascinate me how they deal with much of the worst society has to offer, then go home and live a family life. Then there are those whose lives and relationships have been blighted by the darkness they encounter in their jobs; and the ‘bad apples’, seduced by corruption, criminality and the power of a uniform or badge, sometimes to murderous extremes.
And no police officer is more alone than the undercover cop.
So, let me introduce my latest novel set in 1995, Rat island, published by Silvertail Books. The protagonist, Callum Burke, is an outsider cop. He was a policeman in Belfast and left to serve in the pre-handover Royal Hong Kong Police Force. Under a violent cloud of misconduct, Callum is sent to work on a task force in New York: DEA, NYPD, and HK police. The cops are investigating a heroin pipeline from Hong Kong Triads smuggling narcotics into Manhattan’s Chinatown. The conduit for getting the drugs on street corners around the five boroughs is an Irish American mob. Callum’s job is to infiltrate the Irish and gather evidence to bring a RICO case against the whole shebang.
In writing the novel I interviewed former NYPD detectives. I heard some chilling war stories in which it was easy to imagine those cops experiencing that terrifying feeling of being totally alone. One cop, however, told me you are never truly alone in the NYPD – there are over twenty-thousand cops out there who will rush to your aid.
So it is with Callum. A DEA Special Agent heads the investigation; Callum’s superior and a colleague from Hong Kong man wire taps and transcribe recorded conversations; a couple of NYPD cops ghost him periodically; and belligerent NYPD sergeant Mike O’Connell conducts secret meets with him to unpack the intelligence gathered. The team investigate the network of Triad crime working to facilitate the Irish pushing heroin around the city as Callum gets deeper undercover, and fights to stay alive.
And there’s the rub: when Callum is staring down the barrel of a gun, he is forced to confront his fears and darker nature, and fight for a sense of redemption after leaving a violent past and broken family in Hong Kong.
They say writing is a lonely job, but it can’t compare to the fear and paranoia of undercover police work.
I hope, in Rat Island, I did justice to the story, the subject, and the good guys of that murky world.
| Author Bio – John Steele |
|---|
 John Steele was born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1995, at the age of twenty-two he travelled to the United States and has since lived and worked on three continents, including a thirteen-year spell in Japan. Among past jobs he has been a drummer in a rock band, an illustrator, a truck driver and a teacher of English. He now lives in England with his wife and daughter. He began writing short stories, selling them to North American magazines and fiction digests. He has published three previous novels: RAVENHILL, SEVEN SKINS and DRY RIVER, the first of which was longlisted for a CWA Debut Dagger award. John’s books have been described as ‘Remarkable’ by the Sunday Times, ‘Dark and thrilling’ by Claire McGowan, and ‘Spectacular’ by Tony Parsons. The Irish Independent called John ‘a writer of huge promise’ and Gary Donnelly appointed him ‘the undisputed champion of the modern metropolitan thriller’. |
| Social Media Links – | |
| @JohnSte_author | |
No comments:
Post a Comment