The Dance of the Pheasodile
Page 25
I feel like the last knight of the roundtable who has done what was required of him, and who is now utterly sick of war.
We have never really seen Jerry and Sam since the ordeal. We have other best friends now, Robert and Fiona, and our family life has closed ranks on the past and is in the process of recapturing its former serene beauty.
Mike came down to see us last weekend, with Kathy and Tommy, and we all had a great time. Fran couldn’t make it. She wasn’t feeling well, she said, but sent her love.
* * *
About the author - Tim Roux
Born near Hull in the UK in 1954, Tim was called to the Bar before working for over 20 years in business strategy and strategic brand marketing for a major multinational corporation.
With degrees in both law and social sciences/psychology, and having worked as a volunteer for Amnesty International for several years, he is fascinated by the complex issues surrounding personal rights (human, civil and animal), and much of his writing is centred on these themes.
Tim has a wife and two children, and lives between the UK, France and Belgium running Valley Strategies Ltd. which is a marketing strategy consultancy.
His books to date are:
Blood & Marriage (2007), or From Kingston-upon-Hull to the first genocide of the 20th century. Driving down the Mediterranean to inspect the family papers held by his cousin in Narbonne, David Lambert reviews his own troubled times against the backdrop of his family who fled Germany in the 1880s on pain of death for mutiny and desertion, to face genocide, espionage, bombs, bullets, tragic accidents, murderous designs and that curious fruit cordial Great-Grandma used to make. Classify under genealogy, or something.
[‘The End of the World Sextet’: Book 1]
Little Fingers! (2007), or How good can a killer get? Following her mother’s suicide, Julia Blackburn vows to understand her tragic life. She knows one person she must confront—Mary Knightly. She knows where to find her. She hasn’t a clue what she did. And she knows nothing about her mother’s rapist. Will she take revenge? Will she get away with it? At its heart, “Little Fingers!” asks the troubled question: who does the greater wrong—those who ruin many lives with impunity, or those who kill to stop them?
[‘The End of the World Sextet’: Book 2]
Girl on a Bar Stool (2007). Branding isn’t real life, or is it? When Adam Melton, the ambitious brand manager of Petrovsk Vodka went out on the town that night, he was hoping to pick up a beautiful girl and a few hints and tips from his target market, the vodka-swilling ladettes of Reading. Meeting the sultry Yasemin at the bar in one of his favourite haunts, he got all that he was hoping for, and ominously more. Now he has been condemned to save the world.
[‘The End of the World Sextet’: Book 3]
Shade + Shadows (2008), which is about Alan Harding, an alternative healer with a particularly unusual basis for his therapies, who marries the former wife of a controversial ambassador who survived an assassination attempt by Muslim terrorists. When his wife, Jane, is kidnapped as retribution for her husband’s crimes, everyone assumes that the kidnappers are referring to the ambassador’s activities. However, the good doctor has his own dark secrets . . . .
[‘The End of the World Sextet’: Book 4]
Fishing, for Christians (2008): “When the horror has stopped, when you have watched your beloved children being ripped limb from limb, when your friends have rotted before your eyes, when you yourself have crumbled into dust, snapping and cracking as you go, you will return to this earth as eternal beings in the flesh, your days will be endless, your joys countless, your love infinite. At least, that is the theory. I think that there are a few technical issues to sort out in the meantime. If I were an engineer or an accountant, I would promise you nothing at this point. If I were a salesman, I would promise you the earth. What do you want to hear?” (Testimony of the Archangel Michael).
[‘The End of the World Sextet’: Book 5]
The Ghoul Who Once (2009): Ghosts don’t just come back to haunt you. When the bones of a murdered girl are discovered in the garden of a French holiday home one at a time, the non-stop party-goers up at the nearby Château de
Freyrargues start to bet on which one will turn up next. However the stranger thing is that when her bones are forensically tested, they are found to contain no DNA whatsoever.
[‘The End of the World Sextet’: Book 6]
The Dance of the Pheasodile (2008): Keith and Chrissie McGuire are determined to create a perfect life for themselves and their two children, having been brought up in care homes themselves. Everything is going well: Chrissie is a partner in a London law firm, Keith is an up-and-coming London architect, and the children have all the toys they want. However, when they decide to visit a hypnotherapist to address some residual childhood issues, Keith emerges from his hypnotic trance as Harry Walker, a petty gangster soiling the streets of Hull, locked in deadly rivalry with “Planty”, a notorious Bransholme hard man.
The Blue Food Revolution (2009): She was a girl from an alpine village where she tried to murder her sister. He was a bank clerk from Reading whom her sister tried to murder. Theirs was a marriage made in heaven…..but would they ever meet?
(Just like) El Cid’s Bloomers (2010): Jake Pembleton is a Hull-born singer-songwriter who once killed a man. This doesn’t make him the East Riding folk-singing Yorkshire Ripper of CrackTown’s famous song, but it still plays on his conscience. Now he is in real trouble. Ever since returning home to his wife and kids to find his suitcases parked outside his front door, Jake has been holed up in that wild and lawless part of Hull known as ‘The Avenues’ with a springy nineteen year old groupie who is so sexy that she nearly gives him a heart attack each time she steps out of the shower. Jake’s only hopes are Harry, his wife’s new boyfriend who keeps her sane, and that he will never meet his Kirkella-dwelling parents-in-law again. Beyond that, he just sits there clutching his guitar, writing his songs, loving his girl, and praying for better days and relief from a day job he is too ashamed of to talk about.
Missio (2010): Stevie Francis lost his dad when the Hull trawler, The Gaul, disappeared without trace somewhere on or around 8 February 1974 while fishing in the Barents Sea. Its owners, British United Trawlers, had nicknamed it ‘the unsinkable’. Speculation at the time was that The Gaul had been captured or sunk by the Soviet navy because there was a British government spy on board, or that its fishing net had become entangled with a passing Soviet submarine, or that it had simply become overwhelmed by heavy seas.
The wreck of The Gaul was located in 1997 and the remains of four of its crew were retrieved in 2004. A more recent suggestion is that The Gaul suffered from significant design faults. Walking the rundown streets of his dockland
neighbourhood searching for his cat, Stevie meets The Great Macaroni, a children’s magician who spends his time trying to persuade his young audiences that his real magic is mere trickery. He teaches Stevie that nothing in this world is as it appears, that teaspoons can fly, and that the future is never set even if it has already happened. What he cannot tell him about are the two years of his life that Stevie will spend in absolute darkness.
Table of Contents
The Dance of the Pheasodile