Riot Act

by Zoe Sharp

  And just as her worst fears are realised, Charlie receives devastating personal news. The man who put Sean in his coma is on the loose.

  She is faced with the choice between her loyalties to her client and avenging Sean, but the two goals are soon inextricably linked. The decisions Charlie makes now, and the path she chooses to follow, will have far-reaching consequences.

  ‘Sharp’s heroine Charlie Fox has to be one of the best characters in the crime action thriller genre which is enjoying a massive high these days. Hard as nails, confident as can be and living proof that the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

  'However – and it is a big however – she does not use deadly force unless necessary, unlike many of her contemporaries who kill frequently. She firmly believes in justice and would sooner bring someone in than kill them. Her moral code is very strong and at times it keeps her from becoming as bad as any of the monsters she faces. Yet when push comes to shove, she never flinches from the task at hand regardless of the risk to herself.

  ‘The plot is very cleverly constructed and you are kept guessing until the end as to just who is really behind the kidnappings. The prose is as sumptuous as ever and yet it was not the most impressive part of the novel. For me the best part of Fifth Victim is the grammatical excellence displayed in Sharp’s sentences.

  ‘I read one hell of a lot of these types of novels featuring fights, gunfights, explosions, car chases and more close shaves than a razor salesman. Very, very few of them get so many details right about the mundane details which set the scene, create the atmosphere, manage the pace or deal with the mechanics of the characters' actions and thought processes. Zoë Sharp and Charlie Fox tick more boxes than most with her first person viewpoint and oftentimes caustic wit.

  ‘Why an author as talented as Zoë Sharp is not much more publicly known and lauded is a mystery to me. My own first introduction to her work was when I met her by chance at Harrogate Crime Writing Festival last year. (I had seen her on a panel the previous year and made a mental note to buy one of her books. I was then welcomed into Crimesquad Towers and never got around to buying that book.) As we talked I mentioned that I was with Crimesquad.com and she asked me why her books had never been reviewed. Unable to answer I had to quickly change the subject. Upon my return home I arranged for a copy of Fourth Day which I reviewed and raved about. Which brings me to Fifth Victim, an absolutely brilliant novel which will have this review hound forever chasing the Fox!’ Graham Smith, Crimesquad five-star review

  FOX FIVE

  a Charlie Fox short story collection

  eBook exclusive

  by Zoë Sharp

  (stories also available individually)

  FOX FIVE is a collection of stories by the highly acclaimed crime thriller writer, Zoë Sharp. All feature her ex-Special Forces soldier turned self-defence expert and bodyguard, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox.

  ‘Ill-tempered, aggressive and borderline psychotic, Fox is also compassionate, introspective and highly principled: arguably one of the most enigmatic – and coolest – heroines in contemporary genre fiction.’ Paul Goat Allen, Chicago Tribune

  In A Bridge Too Far, we meet Charlie before she’s become a professional in the world of close protection. When she agrees to hang out with the local Dangerous Sports Club, she has no idea it will soon live up to its name.

  Postcards From Another Country has Charlie guarding the ultra-rich Dempsey family against attempted assassination – no matter where the danger lies.

  A finalist for the CWA Short Story Dagger, Served Cold puts another tough woman centre stage – the mysterious Layla, with betrayal in her past and murder in her heart.

  Off Duty finds Charlie taking time away from close protection after injury. She still finds trouble, even in an out-of-season health spa in the Catskill Mountains.

  And finally, Truth And Lies puts all Charlie’s skills and ingenuity to the test as she has to single-handedly extract a news team from a rapidly escalating war zone.

  Buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

  ‘The author, who has written, among other things, nine books in the acclaimed Charlie Fox series, has now published in e-book form what she terms an “e-thology” a collection of five short stories, and an excellent addition it surely is . . .

  ‘The reader is treated to author notes prefacing each short story, giving insights into its origins, as well as bonus material at the end, with biographical details on the author and her masterful creation, Charlie Fox, all of which just makes the reader look forward to the next novel in the series that much more. Highly recommended.’ Gloria Feit, Crimespree magazine

  ‘This five-pack collection of short stories is about as good as it gets in the crime thriller genre. Protagonist Charlie Fox is a truly memorable – not to mention formidable – heroine. Author Sharp writes cleanly, cleverly, and convincingly as she spins these tales of Charlie . . . as she progresses from a time just prior to becoming a bodyguard to a point where her professional skills are honed to their finest – and must be, as they are put to the test in circumstances as explosively dangerous and up-to-the-minute as today's headlines.

  ‘This range and growth allows us to see Charlie in a quieter, almost sleuth-like mode early on and then evolve into the calculating, ultimately cool – yet compassionate – protector she was born to be.

  ‘It is Charlie Fox and the stiletto-sharp (no pun intended) writing skills of Zoë Sharp that will stick with you after reading these stories. I was unaware of this excellent series before now; but you can damn well bet I will be seeking out more. Highly recommended!’ Wayne D Dundee, author of the Joe Hannibal series

  ‘If you've never read any of Charlie Fox thriller series, these short stories are a great way to meet Charlie Fox at her best. My favourites were Served Cold, Off Duty, and Truth And Lies, where we see the gamut of Charlie's reactions as she handles each situation to a necessary conclusion. This tension-filled and suspenseful collection is a thrilling read that will have you clamouring for more.’ Dru Ann Love, GoodReads.com

  Meet Zoë Sharp

  Zoë Sharp was born in Nottinghamshire, but spent most of her formative years living on a catamaran on the northwest coast of England. After a promising start at a private girls' school, she opted out of mainstream education at the age of twelve in favour of correspondence courses at home.

  Zoë went through a variety of jobs in her teenage years. In 1988, on the strength of one accepted article and a fascination with cars, she gave up her regular job to become a freelance motoring writer. She quickly picked up on the photography side of things and she has worked as far afield as the United States and Japan, as well as Europe, Ireland and the UK. Since her fiction writing career took off, she dovetails her photography with working on her novels.

  Zoë wrote her first novel when she was fifteen, but success came in 2001 with the publication of KILLER INSTINCT – the first book to feature her ex-Special Forces heroine, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox. The character evolved after Zoë received death-threat letters in the course of her photo-journalism work.

  Later Charlie Fox novels – FIRST DROP and FOURTH DAY – were finalists for the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel. The Charlie Fox series has also been optioned for TV.

  As well as the Charlie Fox novels, Zoë's short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, and have been shortlisted for the Short Story Dagger by the UK Crime Writers' Association. Her other writing has been nominated for the coveted Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, the Anthony Award presented by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the Macavity Award, and the Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers’ Association.

  Zoë lives in the English Lake District, and is married. Her hobbies are sailing, fast cars (and faster motorbikes), target shooting, travel, films, music, and reading just about anything she can get her hands on. She and her husband, Andy, who is a non-fiction author, have recently self-built their own house. Zoë b
logs regularly on her own website – www.ZoeSharp.com – and on the acclaimed group blog, www.Murderati.com.

  Meet Charlie Fox

  The idea of a tough, self-sufficient heroine who didn't suffer fools gladly and could take care of herself is one I had lying around for a long time before I first wrote about Charlotte 'Charlie' Fox. The first crime and mystery books I ever read always seemed to be populated by female characters who were only any good at looking decorative and screaming while they waited to be rescued by the men!

  I decided early on that Charlie Fox was going to be very different. She arrived almost as a full-grown character, complete with name, and I never thought of her any other way. At the start of the first book I wrote about Charlie, KILLER INSTINCT, she is a self-defence instructor with a slightly shady military background and a painful past.

  In RIOT ACT, Charlie has moved on to working in a gym, and comes face to face with a spectre from her army past – Sean Meyer. Sean was the training instructor she fell for when they were in the army together and she's never quite forgotten or forgiven him for what she saw as his part in her downfall. Sparks are bound to fly.

  Close protection – the perfect choice

  It's Sean who asks Charlie to go undercover to the bodyguard training school in Germany where the events of HARD KNOCKS take place. Charlie agrees as a favour to him, but gradually realises that close protection work is the perfect choice for an ex-Special Forces trainee who never found herself quite in step with life outside the army that rejected her.

  By the time we get to FIRST DROP Charlie is working for Sean's close protection agency and he accompanies her on her first assignment in Florida. By now she has come to terms a little with her violent abilities – or so she thinks. But then she's plunged into a nightmare in which she has to kill to protect her teenage principal.

  Which is why, at the start of ROAD KILL, Charlie was a little in limbo about her life and her career in close protection. Until, that is, one of her closest friends is involved in a fatal motorcycle crash and she agrees to take on an unpaid bodyguarding job. She and Sean are soon drawn together to protect a group of thrill-seeking bikers on a wild trip to Ireland.

  The second book to be set in the US, SECOND SHOT, starts with a bang – or rather, two of them – when Charlie is shot twice and seriously injured in the course of her latest bodyguarding job in New England. The events of this novel strip away Charlie's usual physical self-assurance and leave her more vulnerable than ever before as she tries to work out what went wrong and still protect her client's four-year-old daughter from harm. Charlie is also forced to confront how far she's prepared to go in order to save the life of a child.

  By THIRD STRIKE, Charlie and Sean are living in New York City and working for Parker Armstrong’s exclusive close-protection agency, where Sean has become a junior partner.

  In this book, I really wanted to finally explore Charlie’s difficult and often destructive relationship with her parents – and in particular with her father. Charlie has to protect her mother and father from harm at all costs, but is hampered by trying not to let them witness just how cold-bloodedly their daughter must act in order to be effective at her job. It puts her in an often impossible situation, brings her relationship with Sean to an explosive head, and causes her father to reveal a side of himself everyone will find disturbing.

  Not only that, but the story ends with big questions over Charlie’s entire future.

  By the start of FOURTH DAY, where Charlie, Sean and Parker Armstrong are planning a cult extraction in California, Charlie has still not solved the problems that arose during the previous book – nor has she found the courage to explain it all to Sean. When she volunteers to go undercover into the Fourth Day cult, she’s looking as much for answers about her own life as about the man who died.

  It's this battle with her own dark side that is one of the most fascinating things for me as a writer about the character of Charlie Fox. I wanted a genuine female action hero, but one who had a convincing back story. I've tried to ensure she stays human, with all the flaws that entails – a sympathetic character rather than just a 'guy in nylons' as someone described some tough heroines in fiction.

  In the latest instalment, FIFTH VICTIM – involving a deadly kidnap plot among the jet-set of Long Island – there are complications with Sean’s ongoing condition, and Charlie’s increasing awareness that her boss, Parker, views her as so much more than a mere employee. Charlie is forced to make decisions this time out that will change her life forever . . .

  The instinct and the ability to kill

  Characters who live on the fringe have a certain moral ambiguity that we find seductive, I feel. Charlie has that obscurity to her make-up. She discovers very early on that she has both the instinct and the ability to kill. And although she does it when she has to and doesn't enjoy what it does to her, that doesn't mean that if you push her in the wrong direction, or you step over that line, she won't drop you without hesitation.

  Dealing with her own capacity for violence when she's put under threat is a continuing theme throughout the books. It's not an aspect of her personality that Charlie finds easy to live with – a difficulty she might not have if she was a male protagonist, perhaps? Even in these days of rabid politically correct equality, it is still not nearly as acceptable for women to be capable of those extremes of behaviour.

  But Charlie has evolved out of events in her life and, as you find out during the course of the series, things are not about to get any easier. I do rather like to put her through it! She's a fighter and a survivor, and I get the feeling that if I met her I'd probably like her a lot. I'm not sure she'd say the same about me!

  Although I've tried to write each of the Charlie Fox books so they stand alone, this is becoming more difficult as time goes on and her personal story overlaps from one book to the next. I'm always expanding on her back story, her troubled relationship with her parents and her even more troubled relationship with Sean, who was once her training instructor in the army and, when she moves into close protection, he then becomes her boss. He continues to bring out the best and the worst in her.

  And their relationship is becoming ever more complicated as the series goes on. In the next outing, Charlie is struggling to deal not only with the dangers faced by her client, but also from the one person she should be able to trust with her life . . .

  If you’re a fan of Charlie Fox, you may well enjoy the second Junior Bender novel from multi-award nominated author, Timothy Hallinan:

  LITTLE ELVISES

  by Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan, the 2011 Edgar and Macavity nominee for Best Novel, brings back Junior Bender, who made his debut in last year's highly praised CRASHED. Junior is a Los Angeles burglar who moonlights as a private eye – for crooks. The “Little Elvises” of the title were Philadelphia teenagers plucked off the city’s stoops in the 1960s by a mobbed-up record producer named Vinnie DiGaudio and turned into pallid imitations of the boy from Tupelo until their fourteen-year-old fans got tired of them and moved on to the next one. When Vinnie is in the cops’ sights for a murder, Junior is brought in, unwillingly, to prove Vinnie’s innocence. Unless, of course, Vinnie did it.

  But one way or another, Vinnie – a gangster whose product was innocence – has made a central mistake. Some things never go away. And that’s what drives the plot of LITTLE ELVISES.

  Praise for Timothy Hallinan:

  “Timothy Hallinan is one of the great unsung mystery writers.” Ken Bruen, author of LONDON BOULEVARD

  “Hallinan is terrific.” T. Jefferson Parker, author of IRON RIVER

  “A stunning talent.” Gregg Hurwitz, author of YOU'RE NEXT

  “Hallinan has a genuine ability to write effective prose, engaging repartee, sharp and witty characterizations.” Washington Post Book World

  “Exceptional – a thriller with a heart . . . haunting and insightful.” The Denver Post on THE QUEEN OF PATPONG

  “Another masterpie
ce of contemporary crime fiction.” Adrian McKinty, author of FIFTY GRAND

  www.TimothyHallinan.com

  LITTLE ELVISES

  excerpt

  Chapter Two – An Original Void

  The month's motel was Marge 'n Ed's North Pole at the north end of North Hollywood. The advantage of staying at the North Pole was that none of the small number of people who believed I'd lived in motels since my divorce from Kathy would figure I'd stoop that low. The disadvantage of staying at the North Pole was everything else.

  Generally speaking, motels have little to recommend them, and the North Pole had less than most. But they made me a moving target, and I could more or less control the extent to which anyone knew where I was at any given time. I'd been divorced almost three years, and the North Pole was my 34th motel, and far and away the worst of the bunch.