– ‘The Magic of Wor(l)ds’ blog is a hobby, reviews and other bookish stuff on this site are done for free. –
Today I’m on the ‘Twenty Sixteen’ blogtour, organized by Zooloo’s Book Tours.
To promote this book I have an excerpt, but before I let you read it first some ‘basic’ information.
About the Author :
Lee Bullman has something of a chequered past but he did once meet Michael Caine on a boat.
He is the author of the best-selling crime memoir Blowback, a collector of early 1960s R’n’B blasters and doesn’t really believe in anything.
When not writing he buys and sells antiques and loves a decent nineteenth century tapestry.
He has a son called Tom and lives with the visual artist Siena Barnes in the birthplace of the gothic imagination where they are restoring a nice old house and happily living the dream.
Synopsis :
Two murders, committed over three decades apart, set in motion a modern noir detective story that plays out against the chaos of a Britain at odds with itself.
As Brexit bites and Britain begins to tear itself apart, DI Reider returns from a manhunt in Europe with a bullet hole in his shoulder and decides it’s time to retire from the force. But Reider hasn’t counted on his first case coming back to haunt him. He hasn’t counted on his career going full circle and he definitely hasn’t counted on Sasha Haye.
Angry and heartbroken, Sasha is seeking answers about the death of her boyfriend and Reider might just be the only person who can help her find them.
Against the backdrop of the referendum and its aftermath, the pair embark on a journey that brings them into contact with extremism, celebrity, politics and the world of vintage porn, as they attempt to unravel a murderous knot with threads that lead into the dark heart of the establishment, and a past which has a cold and unrelenting grip on the present.
Excerpt :
Inna de boomtown
Coventry Central Police Station. Temporary Incident Room.
Sunday August 21st, 1982. 10.22pm
It’s riot night. We’re at the tail end of this long, hot summer and tensions have been rising since Spring, since the TV weathermen went to shirtsleeves and started using words like unprecedented and looking haunted and confused. We should have expected it, we should have seen the signs, read the runes, studied the entrails of dry, smashed birds on these grey city streets but now it’s too late and on the other side of town they’ve tied football scarves around their faces and gone into the homemade bomb business and taken us all by surprise. They’ve set the world on fire and Coventry nick is the first ring of hell.
Cold tea stagnates in the polystyrene cups with jagged half-moon bitten rims on desktops and filing cabinets and I’m the only man in the room not moving. Every other man in here is jacked up on hate and adrenaline, their rictus grimaces emerging here and there from the thick blanket of cigarette smoke hovering at shoulder height and staring at me without registering anything before sinking back into the fog.
The stuttering, percussive radio report emanating from wooden Philips speakers at the far end of the room is playing a running commentary from mobile units on the ground. Two hundred and fifty rioters are currently lighting up cars, tossing bricks through windows and looting shops along the length of the Foleshill Road. The tinny radio signal fights to be heard over the deep bass hum and fury of my esteemed colleagues, the policemen around me. All of them are gearing up for a fight, a ferocious buzz echoes through their demented hive, lit from above by six fizzing fluorescent tubes. Most of the forty-two officers, constables and recruits around me are wearing, carrying, or in the process of putting on matt black, padded riot gear, buckling buckles and tightening straps. The room is moving in slow motion and fast cuts. Some of the men in here are twenty-five years older than me but look like kids at a dressing up box getting ready to play war. A few of the telescopic batons and plexiglass shields are still smeared red with the blood of miners and hippies following recent outings to peace camps and picket lines. I stand amongst them like a ghost and the wall speaker feeds back with this ear-splitting high octave burst of fuzz and static and slices the room in half. The voice that emanates from the speaker belongs to Dave Housman, local copper, young, in the uniform for three months at most. He’s out of control, the fear in his voice is palpable, his training has deserted him and procedure has been replaced by panic.
“Oscar three nine, we’re at… at the corner of the Foleshill Road and Ryton Way, there must be fifty of them, they’re coming from everywhere… we need help, this is just…”
There’s another burst of static until Dave Housman’s hoarse, desperate cries mix with those of the other two officers with him in the car and cause everyone around me to freeze.
“Petrol bombs! they’re lighting fucking petr…”
Then the screams of the policemen fill the car they’re in and the room I’m in as flaming glass bottles smash through the windows of their panda car. The radio falls silent. A palpable, shared hatred for whoever just did that envelops the room and makes whatever happens for the rest of the night personal. The hatred blocks out what little air there was in the room and it chokes me.
The Magic of Wor(l)ds
Marie Anne Cope is an author of contemporary and paranormal fiction. She grew up in Manchester, moving to North Wales in 2005, where she lives with her three cats, Jasmine, Texas, and Stoker.
A four-century-old secret. A vampire curse.
Ritu Bhathal was born in Birmingham in the mid-1970s to migrant parents, hailing from Kenya but of Indian origin. This colourful background has been a constant source of inspiration to her. From childhood, she always enjoyed reading. This love of books is credited to her mother. The joy of reading spurred her on to become creative in her writing, from fiction to poetry. Winning little writing competitions at school and locally encouraged her to continue writing. 
It all 
Award-winning author Gail Meath writes historical romance novels that will whisk you away to another time and place in history where you will meet fascinating characters, both fictional and real, who will capture your heart and soul. Meath loves writing about little or unknown people, places and events in history, rather than relying on the typical stories and settings.
It’s a deadly game of who’s who, and who isn’t. 
Max DeVoe Talley is a writer and artist from New York City who lives in Southern California. He began writing in 1997 and contributed entertainment, food, and humor columns to two California weekly newspapers. 
Jackson Bardo, an out-of-work Private Investigator, is summoned to New Mexico by his ex-girlfriend. Her life is being threatened and she needs money. But he doesn’t have enough when he arrives. And days later, she disappears.
MQ Webb has always believed in the transformational nature of words, and a medium to utilize them. How to Spot a Psychopath is the first book in the Oscar de la Nuit Psychological Thriller series. 
Could you tell… Would you?
William Todd has been writing for over 20 years, primarily gothic horror stories in the style of Lovecraft, Poe, and Shelley. Loving all things Victorian, he was inspired to read (and later to write) by Arthur Conan Doyle. 
While on a well-deserved holiday in the Lake District to get away from the toils and troubles of London, Holmes and Watson find no respite. 
Kerry Birds lives in Derbyshire with her husband and two boys. She is an Environmental Chemist who started reading fiction in her thirties and took up writing soon after. She now writes prolifically, partly to quieten her anxious mind.
The perfect marriage?
Jim McGhee’s a former award-winning environmental journalist.
There’s been a murder. And the only suspect has vanished.
Jack Leavers is a former Royal Marine with over thirty-years’ experience spread across the military, private security, corporate investigations, maritime counter-piracy, and risk management. His varied career has included numerous deployments to conflict zones around the world such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, trouble spots in Africa, and the Somali pirate-infested waters of the Indian Ocean.
Summer 2008 sees former Royal Marine John Pierce lured from running convoys in Iraq to a lucrative contract in the steamy jungles of French West Africa. He soon discovers this new theatre is even more dangerous than the war zone he left behind. Corrupt officials, drug cartels, and competing military factions rub shoulder-to-shoulder in a melting pot of greed and intrigue …And a sadistic foe lurks in the shadows.
The Magic of Wor(l)ds 