BLACKER THAN BLACK

How does an ordinary Joe get sucked into the deadly intrigues and grimy underworld of the pharmaceutical giants, where fortunes, and lives, can ride on a single formulation?
Jack Beam, returns from Africa with a vaccine for Aids. Yet he was seen as a threat, not a hero, and killed off in the first few pages. Leaving Sam Bass, his closest friend, with the task of tracking down the killer. His training was in medicine, not crime detection, so it became inevitable that his naivety would lead him into a succession of blunders.
Sir Daniel Dunham, head of a medium-sized pharmaceutical company, has visions of grandeur. With access to raw heroine from Afghanistan, he sets up an international crime cartel to help him grow into a giant.
It is this underworld that Bass enters. With his girlfriend, Stephanie, and a retired burglar who knows the criminal world intimately, Bass is drawn from London to Portugal in chase of Beam’s killer. Several murders later, Bass finds himself half-way up a mountain in Madeira with the killer – Kyle. Kyle reveals the dark secrets of the pharmaceutical company and its ambitions. They fight to the death, on a balcony up the mountain called ‘Lovers’ Leap’.

BLACKER THAN BLACK is a thriller with a cascade of suspenseful uncertainties and nerve-wracking tensions that draws its readers along a relentless trail with a single-minded goal – to catch a killer. It also brings them into unpredictable conflict with corrupt and menacing outside forces.
Its strengths are a powerful, fast-moving plot and how the main characters interact with one another, in love and in crime.
The novels of Robin Cook, Tess Gerritsen, Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs have shown there is a strong market for thrillers with a medical theme. And, of course, Le Carre’s THE CONSTANT GARDENER.