FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four

by Zoe Sharp

  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 blogs 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 pro
tection, 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 . . .

  And now an excerpt from RUN by Blake Crouch.

  For fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Thomas Harris, picture this: a landscape of American genocide . . .

  5 DAYS AGO

  A rash of bizarre murders swept the country . . .

  Senseless. Brutal. Seemingly unconnected.

  A cop walked into a nursing home and unloaded his weapons on elderly and staff alike.

  A mass of school shootings.

  Prison riots of unprecedented brutality.

  Mind-boggling acts of violence in every state.

  4 DAYS AGO

  The murders increased ten-fold . . .

  3 DAYS AGO

  The President addressed the nation and begged for calm and peace . . .

  2 DAYS AGO

  The killers began to mobilize . . .

  YESTERDAY

  All the power went out . . .

  TONIGHT

  They’re reading the names of those to be killed on the Emergency Broadcast System. You are listening over the battery-powered radio on your kitchen table, and they’ve just read yours.

  Your name is Jack Colclough. You have a wife, a daughter, and a young son. You live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People are coming to your house to kill you and your family. You don’t know why, but you don’t have time to think about that any more.

  You only have time to . . .

  RUN

  Praise for Blake Crouch:

  “Gut wrenching . . . the writing is tight, the plots exciting, the suspense unending . . . Crouch tops my list.” Ottawa Sun

  “Expertly paced and viscerally effective, with many surprises and genuine chills.” Kirkus reviews

  “Blake Crouch is the most exciting new thriller writer I’ve read in years.” David Morrell

  “Harrowing . . . terrific . . . a whacked out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Pat Conroy

  “Crouch delivers his description of place with vivid prose . . . his carefully crafted characters make the story immediate, intense and thoroughly believable.” Denver Post

  www.BlakeCrouch.com

  RUN

  excerpt

  The president had just finished addressing the nation, and the anchors and pundits were back on the airwaves, scrambling, as they had been for the last three days, to sort out the chaos.

  Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin.

  She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the anchors look scared.”

  Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television.

  “I got called up,” he said.

  “Your Guard unit?”

  “I have to report tomorrow morning.” He lit another one. “What I hear, we’ll just be patrolling neighborhoods.”

  “Keeping the peace until it all blows over?”

  He glanced at her, head cocked with that boyish smirk she’d fallen for six months ago when he’d deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical malpractice case. “Does anything about this make you feel like it’s going to blow over?”

  A new banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen – 45 dead in a mass shooting at a Southern Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dee said.

  Kiernan dragged heavily on his cigarette. “Something’s happening,” he said.

  “Obviously. The whole country—”

  “That’s not what I mean, love.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He didn’t answer right away, just sat there for a while, smoking.

  “It’s been coming on now, little by little, for days,” he said finally.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I barely do myself.”

  Through the cracked window of their hotel room – distant gunshots and sirens.

  “This was supposed to be our week,” she said. “You were going to tell Myra. I was—”

  “You should go home, be with your family.”

  “You’re my family.”

  “Your kids at least.”

  “What is this, Kiernan?” She could feel an angry knot bulging in her throat. “Are we not in this together? Are you having second thoughts about everything or what?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Do you have any concept of what I’ve already sacrificed for you?”

  She couldn’t see all of his face in the mirror on the opposite wall, but she could see his eyes. Gaping into nothing. A thousand-yard stare. Somewhere other than this room. He’d gone deep, and she’d sensed it even before this moment, in the way he’d made love to her. Something held back. Something missing.

  She climbed out of bed and walked over to her dress where she’d thrown it against the wall two hours ago.

  “You don’t feel it?” he asked. “Not at all?”

  “I don’t understand what—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Kiernan—”

  “Fucking forget it.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Dee pulled the straps over her shoulders as Kiernan glared at her through the cloud of smoke around his head. He was forty-one years old, with short black hair, and a two-day shadow that reminded her so much of her father.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You and I are not the same anymore, Dee.”

  “Did I do something or—”

  “I’m not talking about our relationship. It’s deeper. It’s . . . so much more profound than that.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She was standing by the window. The air coming in was cool and it smelled of the city and the desert that surrounded it. A pair of gunshots drew her attention, and when she looked through the glass she saw grids of darkness overspreading the city.

  Dee glanced back at Kiernan, and she’d just opened her mouth to say something, when the lights and the television in their room cut out.

  She froze.

  Her heart accelerating.

  Couldn’t see anything but the flare and fade of Kiernan’s tobacco ember.

  Heard him exhale in the dark, and then his voice, all the more terrifying for its evenness.

  “You need to get away from me right now,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s this part of me, Dee, getting stronger every time I breathe in, that wants to hurt you.”

  “Why?”

  She heard the covers rip back. The sound of Kiernan rushing across the carpet.

  He stopped inches from her.

  She smelled the tobacco on his breath, and when she palmed his chest, felt his body shaking.

  “What’s happening to you?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t stop it, Dee. Please remember that I love you.”

  He put his hands on her bare shoulders, and she thought he was going to kiss her, but then she was flying through darkness across the room.

  She crashed into the entertainment center, stunned, her shoulder throbbing from the impact.

  Kiernan shouted, “Now get the fuck out while you still can.”

  ***

  Jack Colclough moved down the hallway, past the kids’ bedrooms, and into the kitchen, where four candles on the granite countertop and two more on the breakfast table made this the brightest room in the house. Dee stood in shadow at the sink, filling another milk jug with water from the tap. The cabinets surrounding he
r thrown open and vacated, the stovetop cluttered with cans of food that hadn’t seen the light of day in years.

  “I can’t find the roadmap,” Jack said.

  “You looked under the bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Last place I saw it.”

  Jack set the flashlight on the counter and stared at his fourteen-year-old daughter, pouting at the breakfast table, her purple-streaked blond hair twirled around her finger.