The Cover
The Reckless Engineer
By Jac Wright
Publisher: Soul Mate Publishing
ISBN-13-9880770074082
Available for Purchase: November 6th, 2013
The Excerpt
The Main Characters
1
Friday, October 15 – The Day of Arrest
Harry and Jeremy were just about
to call it a day and head over to the pub for a drink when the call came
through. Harry had gathered the files and papers spread over the round table that
stood diagonally opposite the large polished oak desk that dominated his
office. There they liked to sit in the afternoon, take stock, and mull over
matters at hand once every few days. The London sky, turning a misty orange-red
through the window behind Harry, was being served to them lukewarm and sliced
finely into stripes by the blind. Jeremy didn’t envy Harry his large
west-facing office. He liked his sun served whole, with a black Americano and
two sugars, early in the morning.
Harry had pricked up his ears on
the phone. ‘Jeremy, it’s for you,’ he said, locking grave eyes onto his
friend’s, ‘from the Guildford police station. Do you want to take it in here?’
A call to Jeremy from a
police station was an odd occurrence. It must be something serious, he thought.
He had learned by then that such a look from Harry portended serious events to
follow without fail.
‘Thanks, Harry.’ He took
the phone. ‘Hello?’
He was wholly unprepared
for the voice that came through to him.
‘Jeremy, it’s Jack, from Marine
Electronics. You remember Michelle? She’s dead, man. I’ve been arrested. I need
a solicitor.’
. . .
The Victim
2
The Summer Of The Year Before
The Monday that Michelle
Williams started work at Marine Electronics was a scorching hot midsummer day.
From the fourth floor wall of glass on the west wing of the seven-storey
building owned by Marine, Jeremy and his fellow engineers were treated to a
panoramic view of the landscape stretching all the way to Portsmouth Bay where
the waters lay out in the sun and made light ripples, too lazy and too content
to get up and make even the occasional wave. The bay was thus greeting the day
cheerfully shimmering in the mid-morning sun when Steve, the QA team leader,
brought Michelle over for a quick introduction to Jeremy’s team. Quality
Assurance essentially meant “testing”; a QA team sat next to each engineering
team and ran many series of rigorous tests after Engineering was done with the
research, design, and development of various stages of a product.
Engineering was a male
dominated field. There was only one female, Sally Trotter, in Jeremy’s team of
one physicist, one mechanical engineer, and ten electronic engineers. He could
see that Michelle’s long bleached hair, sleeveless low-cut blouse, endless legs
tanned from a bottle, three inch stilettos, and hot-pink claws—so long they
were surely retracted in for typing—did not go unnoticed by the boys.
. . .
Caitlin McAllen Connor - The Wife
Caitlin McAllen-Connor
was a stunning woman at 38 with dark hair, porcelain skin, and a face made
regal by prominent cheekbones and deep-sea blue eyes. She packed her 5’ 7”
medium frame with the toned muscles of a woman who had firm control over the
world’s most exquisite foods she had readily available to her and was kept very
active and busy by her normal life without being expressly athletic. Caitlin
kept house, garden, horses, dogs, and rare exotic Silkie birds with the same
flair and precision with which she kept the McAllen Industries’ books.
If anything challenged
Caitlin’s self-control it was cigarettes, which she liked to roll herself from
fine imported tobacco. She was always quitting for Jack and Gillian’s sake, but
was always eventually failing, particularly in the event of anything that
disturbed her world. No more than three or four times a week she would retreat
with her vintage black-satin embroidered tobacco box to one of her selection of
outdoor “smoking-seats” she had had specially built in her landscaped garden,
at least one to suit any particular kind of weather. There Jeremy saw her
extinguishing her cigarette at her favourite sheltered autumn seat in the
falling early evening darkness, under-lit by the subtly shifting lights of the
subterranean fish tank beneath the glass on which she stood. She hurried
towards him, flanked by the obedient Alsatians, as he got out of the car.
‘Jeremy, thank god
you are here,’ she cried, giving him a nervous, anxious hug. ‘Is Jack okay?’
‘He is in good hands with
Harry, Caitlin,’ Jeremy reassured her and followed her indoors. He had briefly
explained on the phone that Barrett Stavers had been brought in as Jack’s
solicitors.
Someone who did not know
Caitlin might have been surprised to see a used crystal Champaign glass and a
half-empty bottle of Champaign by the living room seats to which she led him
only a few hours after her husband had been taken into custody. Champaign,
however, was what Caitlin drank. When others drank beer, cocktail, fine wine,
Scotch, brandy, port, or sherry, Caitlin drank Champaign for no reason other
than she liked the taste of it.
. . .
Douglas McAllen & Solicitor Magnus Laird
At six foot four in
height Douglas McAllen was an immense, imposing, and regal presence that owned
every room he walked into. Like Caitlin he lightly packed his tall and broad
frame with lean flesh and muscles, somewhat slackened with time, without being
either over or under weight. His face was crinkled with fine lines like cracked
drying mud, and the equally wrinkled hand he extended to them betrayed a slight
tremor from his sixty odd years of life on earth and from the strain of his
daughter’s plight.
‘Harry Stavers?’ His deep voice
resounded through the room. He slouched down and extended a hand to Harry whose
five-foot six-inch slim frame was dwarfed by the presence of the older man.
‘Pleased to meet you in
person, Mr. Stavers, and thank you for stepping in to help my daughter and
son-in-law so effectively. This is Magnus Laird from McKinley & Laird
Solicitors.’
Magnus Laird walked in a
step behind Douglas McAllen and was also a presence of massive proportions in
his own right. The two or three inches in height and the half-a-dozen or so years
in age he lacked relative to his client, he made up for with three or four
stones of extra weight packed liberally around his torso. His face was
dominated by a thick walrus moustache, which he was in the habit of combing
down with his right forefinger every now and then.
. . .
Otter - The Sidekick
Otter had debuted his
West End career performing with a modern dance company and had aptly acquired
his stage name in the early days from his graceful dance moves on the stage.
That, however, was not the only reason for his name. Otter was clearly gay and
proudly and loudly carried his gracefulness on stage into real life. There
wasn’t a movement that he made where his hands and other parts of his body did
not make an elaborately graceful bend, wave, zigzag, or twirl. He had a black
grandmother of whom he spoke often with great affection and the combination of
genes gave him golden skin, freckles on his nose and cheekbones, and a pile of
long golden-brown ringlets at the top of his head that spread in every
direction and bounced and danced as fluidly as his body and limbs with every
movement. He always wore a trademark tank-top showcasing his toned, muscular,
and lithe body whenever he was working, accessorized with a glittery black
cardigan on colder days.
Otter had nowadays moved
into acting and backstage production and was today doing the costumes for the
stage adaptation of the acclaimed Ealing comedy The Ladykillers at the Gielgud
Theatre.
. . .
The Author
Jac Wright is a published poet, published author, and
an electronics engineer educated at Stanford, University College London,
and Cambridge who lives and works in England. Jac studied English
literature from the early age of three, developing an intense love for poetry,
drama, and writing in Speech & Drama classes taken every Saturday for
fourteen years, and in subsequent creative writing classes taken during the
university years. A published poet, Jac's first passion was for literary
fiction and poetry writing as well as for the dramatic arts. You will
find these influences in the poetic imagery and prose, the dramatic scene
setting, and the deep character creation.The Giveaway
THE CLOSET - Giveaway
for Cover Reveal/Excerpt 5 copies
By Jac Wright
ISBN-13: 978-1490371788
Love is a battlefield. Who will get out of it
alive?
Harry Duncan Wood runs a hotel in the historic city of
Bath with his beautiful young wife. When he falls in love with Mill House, an
old greystone farmhouse on the banks of river Avon among the soaring hills of
Somerset, and sets about moving his family there, the first appearances of the
cracks in the marriage take him by surprise. Is his wife seeing another man?
Duncan needs to get to the bottom of the affairs for his own sanity. Sometimes,
however, ignorance is bliss and will also keep everybody alive.
The Closet is written in the tradition of Charles
Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Thomas Hardy's Wessex Tales as the first in
the collection of literary short fiction, but with an added element
of suspense. It accompanies the first title in the author's
full-length literary suspense series, The Reckless Engineer, published by Soul Mate Publishing,
New York.
Giveaway Ebook Giveaway Ends
13/11/13 Open only to those who can legally enter, receive and use an ebook.
Winning Entry will be verified prior to prize being awarded. No purchase
necessary. You must be 18 or older to enter or have your parent enter for you.
The winner will be chosen by rafflecopter and announced here as well as emailed
and will have 48 hours to respond or a new winner will be chosen. This giveaway
is in no way associated with Facebook, Twitter, Rafflecopter or any other
entity unless otherwise specified. The number of eligible entries received
determines the odds of winning. Giveaway was organized by Kathryn from Shelf Full of
Books and sponsored by the author. VOID WHERE
PROHIBITED BY LAW.
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