Sunday, August 26, 2012

Brilliant Review In The Sun

The Sun has just given my book False Friends a brilliant review.  False Friends got to Number 4 in the Sunday Times hardback bestseller list, too, which also cheered me up no end!


Friday, August 3, 2012

False Friends - And True Heroes



False Friends is out, and selling well.  It’s already in the Top 100 on Kindle and is in all good bookshops and supermarkets.

There are two new characters in the book that I’m really pleased with. Harveer “Harvey” Malik and Manraj “Raj” Chaudhry, British-born Pakistanis who have infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell on behalf of MI5.

Because they are innocents in the undercover business, Dan “Spider” Shepherd is brought in to babysit them.

Harvey and Raj are great characters and I’m thinking of bringing them back in a novel of their own.  I’ve written Muslim characters before, but generally they’ve been terrorists planning to cause mayhem in the UK.  In False Friends, Raj and Harvey are true heroes, putting their lives on the line for their country.  It was something getting inside the heads of characters so different from me in terms of ethnicity and religion, but I was helped by a pal who is a UK-born Bangladeshi Muslim who gave me an insight about what it’s like to be a British-born Asian Muslim in the UK post 9-11.

I’m already plotting the Spider Shepherd book for 2013 – based on the Russian oligarchs who now call London their home.  There have been a number of Russian assassinations taking place in London and I’m going to involve Spider!