Fast-paced, twisty, crime thriller set in Bristol and Teesside
Kandinsky's life is at rock-bottom. He's a gambler in debt to a vicious loan-shark and he's going nowhere fast. Then, by chance, he overhears a conversation and realises he has a way out of his mess. He decides to hijack a robbery of seven hundred and fifty grand's worth of drug money.
He thinks it's going to be easy - a sure thing.
But when your partners are even bigger losers than you are, and the owner of the money is a sadistic drug-dealer who's prepared to kill everybody in his way, nothing's ever easy. And when the people you've stolen from want a piece of you too, the only thing that's sure is there's going to be blood. And lots of it.
The Gamblers is a dark, fast-moving and violent odyssey through the Bristol underworld - the kind of place where every smile hides a betrayal and the hand of friendship usually carries a gun. The Gamblers is a vicious British noir in the tradition of Derek Raymond and Ted Lewis.
Excerpt
The street was awash with litter of all kinds, especially human, and the council had long since ceased to care about patching up the road that ran through it, which was now as pockmarked and cratered as the surface of the moon.
Hollow-eyed junkies flitted from dealer to dealer, looking for the best deal, before retreating to their dark hovels, where they could poison their bodies in peace.
Dave McManus wolfed down a breakfast bap, drank black coffee, and watched the morning’s entertainment, scanning the scurrying figures for one specific junky. Even at eight in the morning the street was busy, and Dave thought with some amusement that there really was no rest for the wicked. He had considered kicking down a few doors and turning over a few rocks in his search for Kieran Hollis, but he was too tired and lazy and thought it best that the junky came to him.
It didn’t take long for Kieran to appear. He shuffled out of one of the squats and looked up and down the street with shifty glances. He was dressed in a long black coat that looked like it had had twenty previous owners and a t-shirt and jean ensemble that was stained and ragged. He buttoned up the coat, turned up the collars, so they covered the lower half of his face, put his hands in his pockets and walked in the direction of the nearest dealer.
A young black guy said something to Kieran. The junky answered by mumbling something into his collar. They disappeared into a darkened doorway and seconds later Kieran emerged, went to his left, picked up an empty Sprite can from the gutter, and walked back in the direction of the squat.
PI novel set in Manhattan during the 1980s when art galleries and model agencies were the two most glamorous businesses in the world. Dangerously well written.
Read Chapter 1 here: https://www.lit4u.com/art-and-beauty-chapter-1/
Literary Titan
Prime-Time Crime Time (600 pages) is a collection of 35 fictional crime/detective stories and the work is author Jay Dubya's 43rd published hardcover/paperback book.
A jaded cold case investigator finds himself trying to solve a thirty year old mystery when the skeletal remains of two missing teenagers are found in a national park.
