Published by
riverrun,
20 July 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-52942-007-4 (HB)
Jacob Meaney earns very little as a translator and is desperate to raise enough money for the deposit on a flat in Brighton. His girlfriend Carla has threatened to leave him for good if he fails.
Then unexpectedly he is offered an extremely well-paid two-week job as an interpreter by Eloise. She represents a company run by a Ukrainian who mainly speaks Russian, and they need someone who can converse in a number of different languages. He reluctantly agrees as he is a translator and as he explains, it is very different from an interpreter, however he really needs the money.
He is flown to a luxurious house with extensive grounds in Austria owned by Myoslav Bondarenko. He wonders what he has got himself into when his phone and passport are taken off him. Jacob is told the company is in pharmaceuticals concentrating mainly on a new wonder fertility drug.
Soon it becomes clear that an Indian from Mumbai named Nazim is putting pressure on Bondarenko to arrange a fifty-fifty deal with him. However, he adamantly refuses and deliberately taunts Nazim which leads to a great deal of bloodshed.
Jacob of course is caught up in the middle as he has to interpret between the two opposing figures. He also becomes suspicious that Nazim intends taking over completely, does he tell Bondarenko? He is in a real quandary.
Events really now begin to heat up, especially when Jacob discovers Bondarenko is not his real name and has connections to the Donetsk mafia. He becomes very suspicious about the legality of the supposed wonder drug and realises that no way can they allow him to ever go free as he will know too much of their real operations. He becomes desperate to get out, but the security is watertight and armed men patrol the perimeters.
Jacob befriends the maid Vlada who has been trafficked and is being held against her will. They try to come up with a plan to escape, but it all seems hopeless at every turn.
When things really come to a head between Nazim and Bondarenko, what will happen to Jacob and Vlada?
A thoroughly engrossing tension filled thriller
which I cannot praise and recommend highly enough.
------
Reviewer: Tricia Chappell
G.W. Shaw is a pseudonym used by William
Shaw who was born in Newton abbot,
Devon, and grew up in Nigeria and lived for sixteen years in hackney. Starting
out as assistant editor of the post-punk magazine ZigZag, he has been
a journalist for The Observer, The New York Times, Wired, Arena and The
Face and was Amazon UK Music Journalist of the Year in 2003. He is
the author of several non-fiction books including Westsiders: Stories of
the Boys in the Hood, about a year spent with the young men of South
Central Los Angeles, and A Superhero For Hire, a compilation of
columns in the Observer Magazine. A Song from Dead Lips was
the first in a series of crime fiction books set in London in 1960’s featuring
DS Breen and WPC Tozer. His most recent series features DS Alexander Cupidi. He
lives in Brighton.
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