“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …” The Somali pirates are popping up all over the place these days (although mostly off the coast of Somalia, it has to be said). Elmore Leonard and Stella Rimington are two authors to have set their novels against a backdrop of Somali piracy, and now sometime Dublin resident Stephen Leather is adding his pieces-of-eight’s worth with FAIR GAME. To wit: Kidnapping is one of the cruellest crimes - lives are put at risk for cold, hard cash. But when Somali pirates seize the crew of a yacht off the coast of Africa, they bite off more than they can chew. One of the hostages has friends in high places and Spider Shepherd is put on the case. He goes deep undercover in an audacious plan to bring an end to the pirate gang’s reign of terror. But as Shepherd closes in on his quarry he realises that there’s much more at stake than the lives of the hostages and that the pirates are involved in a terrorist plot that will strike at the heart of London.FAIR GAME, by the way, is Leather’s eight Spider Shepherd novel, and his 25th in total, by my reckoning. Prolific stuff. “If I get any spare time I’ll be working on a new thriller set in the United States,” says Leather on his blog, “using Richard Yokely, who appears in several of the Spider Shepherd books. And I really want to do a sequel to PRIVATE DANCER. I just wish there were more hours in the day.”
Settle down there, squire. Leave a little paper in the rain forest for the rest of us working chumps …
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