Blurb
On Your Marks, set, GO!!
2017, the eyes of the world focus on London and the World athletic championships. For Detective Inspector Quinn Tempest-Stewart it starts with a world sized headache with the discovery of a naked woman hanging from the curtain rail of an exclusive hotel. The room is clean, chemically cleaned. There are no forms of identification, no trace of clothing, and no biometric identification.
Quinn’s investigation leads him to Portendown, a secretive British government germ warfare facility. His intrusion is not welcomed, that is until 18 immigrants are found, dead, on a deserted beach.
Whilst the chase is on to reclaim Portendown’s missing secret. Quinn must interact with MI6, rogue MI5 agents and countries that have their own agenda.
His investigation brings him into contact with the East Turkestan Liberation army, ultimately uncovering a far greater threat in the form of a group known as The East India Company and its true objectives…
Background
Quinn Tempest-Stewart, as if the name doesn’t give it away, is not your average detective. Son of the ex-Governor of Hong Kong, he has known a privileged lifestyle.
A career seemingly mapped out by birth right: private school, university, Sandhurst Royal military academy, a post in the grenadier guards, and finally a career in the diplomatic service. Except Quinn needed more. After a five-year hiatus, and a classified military record, Quinn returns to London and much against his father’s wishes joins the metropolitan police force....
The list of British detectives is as brilliant as it is long, Thorne, Rebus, Morse, Marple and Tennison. In their own right, they define an era, a city, a lifestyle. In this age of political correctness and the intrusive tell all nature of social media, modern day policing is constantly under the microscope.
Immersed in the vast criminal landscape London provides and inspired by thriller novels, such as the Jack Reacher series, the character of Quinn Tempest-Stewart, weighed by the baggage of military service and the potential of reverse discrimination arising from his privileged up-bringing, offered a chance to break out of a standard police procedural and add an external threat to Quinn’s own personal world in the form of the British East India company.
This secretive group is based on the original East India Company that existed from 1600 to 1874. The company, under a Royal charter, traded with India, created its own private army and imposed its own laws. My modern-day version is an autonomous organisation imposing that same lack of moral integrity. To add further spice, there is history between Quin’s family lineage and the company.
Boarding school can never be the answer for lack of parental skills. Quinn’s father and mother have never been in his life – well, not quite true, his mother has – but you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly how much. Adding in Quinn’s traumatic military experiences and the self-destructive personality that arises from abandonment issues, we get a complex personality as much in conflict with himself as the world.
