Road Kill

fastened my seatbelt and leaned back against the headrest, briefly closing my eyes.

“You OK?” Sean asked.

I opened my eyes again, found him watching me with that faint little half-smile hovering round his lips.

I sighed. “I suppose so,” I said, giving him a rueful smile in return. “If only they’d trusted me . . .”

“Trust’s a funny thing,” he said softly. “Sometimes people make you wait for it longer than you think they ought to.”

He put his hand on the centre console between us, palm upwards. After a second I put my own down on top of it, felt his fingers close around mine. And I was suddenly aware of not being quite so alone in this any more. I sat up, squared my shoulders.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere away from here,” I said. “Find me a job, Sean. It’s time I went back to work.”

From the Author’s notebook

ROAD KILL came about because of a snippet I spotted in a local Lancaster newspaper. It reported that during the summer months an unusually high number of motorcyclists had been killed on the country road between the motorway turnoff and a popular weekend bikers’ haunt at Devil’s Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale.

The police were dismissing the accidents as “rider error”, but it got me thinking, What if it wasn’t accidental? What if it was deliberate . . .?

The story also gave me the opportunity to explore two themes that had been on my mind for some time.

The first of these was that all bikers on page and screen seemed to be portrayed as gun-running, meth lab- running outlaws. Yes, the members of the Devil’s Bridge Club do break the law, but they’re hardly career criminals, and I wonder how much their attitude towards the legal and illegal is coloured by their usual contact with the police – being stopped for speeding.

The second was that Ireland often got the unpleasant end of the stick as far as the media went. I’ve spent quite a bit of time there, both north and south of the border, and loved the place. On the whole, it’s very different from the gloomy, violence-ridden image gleaned from the news reports.

Finally, when I was writing this book, I knew the ending was going to take place on the ferry coming home, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was all going to happen. Then I had the chance to spend a day crawling all over an Irish Sea ferry, learning the ins and outs of its complex fire-fighting systems. The way it operates is exactly as described in the story – a nice example of how the truth is often so much better than anything you could invent.

Acknowledgements

As always, various people generously allowed me to pick their brains in order to write this book. These include Robert J Breden FGA DGA of Banks Lyon Jewellers in Lancaster; medical expert Kate Merriman BMBS MRCS; John Morris, Managing Director of Mondello Park race circuit in Naas, near Dublin; John Robinson at Safety Services Agency in Belfast; and former RAF bomb disposal expert, Robert Roper. Thank you all. The facts are yours, but I take the blame for any artistic licence.

Yet more people waded their way through the typescript and pointed out the glaring plot-holes. Therefore, my grateful thanks go to Peter Doleman, Claire Duplock, Sarah Harrison, Caroline and Robert Roper, Tim Winfield, my editor Anna Valdinger, and my copy editor Sarah Abel.

Also big thanks to ZACE eBook Conversion for immaculate conversion of the printed book to e-format; to Jane Hudson of NuDesign for the brilliant cover; and to Lee Goldberg for generously allowing me to include an excerpt from KING CITY as a bonus feature at the end of this novel.

But most of all, thanks belong to my husband, Andy, who suffered probably more than I did throughout every twist and turn.

if you’ve enjoyed ROAD KILL, why not try Zoe Sharp’s Other Works:

Buy the Books!

the Charlie Fox crime thrillers

KILLER INSTINCT

RIOT ACT

HARD KNOCKS

FIRST DROP

(ROAD KILL)

SECOND SHOT

Excerpt from SECOND SHOT

THIRD STRIKE

FOURTH DAY

FIFTH VICTIM – out in e-format Spring 2012