A Hard Day’s Work

It really is a hard day’s work, but I love putting on my gangster hat and then sitting down at my computer to lose myself in writing another East End Nine-to-Five Shelter gangster novel. which, I have no hesitation in admitting, unleashes the Jekyll and Hyde persona lurking sinisterly beneath my meek and mild, “wouldn’t harm a fly” personality.

Bad Times, the title of the fifth novel in this series, best describes what comes next in the life of Star Cleary, and in her work at the gangster-funded Nine-to-Five Shelter, as she finds herself helplessly drawn into the escalating war between the Beaney and Swann gangs.  The line comes ever closer to being crossed with the real possibility of there being no way back for her.

The boss of the Beaney gang, Krait Beaney, remains, as ever, a stoic solitary figure, who is always in complete control of the crime world he has built up and his brothers, psychopathic Bobbo and Knuckles, an ex-boxer, who lost much of his nerve after having been near fatally shot by a trigger-happy member of Swann’s crew.  Johnnie Swann’s obsession with eliminating the Beaney gang escalates from being ridiculously absurd to high octane, explosively dangerous.  The more so because, as Johnnie’s trusted right-hand man, Frido, points out to him, he is taking his eye off the end game.  Added to this is Johnnie’s son, Frank Garibaldi, who is wanted in the UK for murder and who has been banished by his father to Spain.  Frank has an end game of his own, one he is about to play out.

It’s all there in my head, waiting for me to get it out and up on my computer screen as fast as I can.

No one is safe, including me, as I don’t think I can bear the suspense!