Books
4 Bones Sleeping
Synopsis
A few weeks after the end of the war. Crime reporter Jack Carter becomes drawn into the shady world of clubs, extortion and women of the night. A man out of his depth, struggling to come to terms with the chance of sudden wealth and the inherent dangers that went hand in hand in those post-war years. Despite the risks, he decides to sting an unbalanced extortionist. Its an impulsive and outrageous con. One that Jack soon realises, means a life looking over his shoulder for men hell-bent on revenge.
Thirty-five years later and Jack lives the life of a small town, independent newspaper owner. Life is comfortable, until a young girls sudden death that is. Jack is at the scene at the same time as the police. Did she fall, or was she pushed out of the third-floor window of her expensive public school? Just fifteen, promiscuous and a drug user. Jack doesn't realise it at the time, but events connected to the end of the war are about to come winging down from London and threaten his rural idyll.
He soon grasps this fact at the coroner's court where he stares at the dead girl's father sat in front of him. Someone with a different identity, but a man that Jack instantly recognises. Teddy Lewis, the same man he took to the cleaners years earlier. A madman, one that plied his psychotic trade either side of the Thames in London thirty five years earlier. Someone that still lived alongside the river, but in a sleepy Berkshire village now. A dark-skinned man that had aged well, but Jack guessed would still harbour thoughts of a vicious reprisal.
A few days later and a woman is beaten to death at the same time as a body of a London gangster is found. A man that had been buried for thirty five years that somehow links to the recently murdered woman. Questions soon start coming Jack's way. How did four bodies burnt to a crisp in a London club, connect to recent events? Jack's fighting a dangerous old enemy on one front and an inquisitive police officer on the other. What does he do? Tell the truth and go to prison? Say nothing and risk the wrath of an avenging psychopath?