Articles liés à Payback
Synopsis
Geoff Summers is a brilliant designer of electronic control systems for a company that manufactures and installs anti-burglar equipment. When his wife Penny dies following a brain operation, Geoff’s life is shattered. Worse, his vindictive new managing director Adam Ford has prevented Geoff from fulfilling Penny’s dying wish. Embittered, Geoff is determined to bring the man down. Samantha Bowen, Ford’s secretary who was Penny’s best friend, helps Geoff to get back from the brink of despair. Geoff conceives a plan. He alters a few alarm system controllers that are for jobs in progress, so that they can be switched off by a special remote that he makes in secret. One controller is destined to be installed at the home of Jim Warwick, a wealthy car dealer who has made the bulk of his fortune trading in drugs. Warwick is being investigated by a private detective who suspects that he had killed his daughter’s fiancée. The detective, who has been hired by the victim’s parents, discovers that Warwick has covered his tracks with the help of a police detective in his pay. Geoff quits his job, teams up with a gang of criminals and with his remote device they pull off several lucrative heists. Meanwhile Samantha has become an important part of his life and he lives in fear of losing her because she knows about, and disapproves of, his criminal activities. The last job takes place at Warwick’s house one night when, unknown to the burglars, a shipment of drugs that is being tracked by Scotland Yard’s Drugs squad is to be delivered. Essex police, who want Warwick on a separate charge of murder, learn of the Drugs squad’s imminent raid and step in. The action reaches its climax that night when Warwick and the gang are arrested. As he planned, Geoff gets away and he leaves the country, having set up in advance an ingenious plan for slow and sweet revenge. It is all the sweeter when Samantha, who has kept him guessing, joins him.
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À propos de l'auteur
Chris Calder admits to having been in his healthy seventies before he wrote his first novel. Following an interesting if occasionally precarious period running his small engineering business, he retired to rural France. Modernising an old farmhouse and doing a Lazarus job on the adjacent derelict cottage to make it suitable for holiday letting kept him busy. As he settled into an active, healthy lifestyle, Chris looked forward to enjoying his tranquil rural existence for years to come. But just when he thought that life couldn’t be better, the bombshell dropped. He was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. The consultant explained that Chris would first need explorative surgery to determine the size and location of the tumour. After that procedure he was recuperating in hospital, spending time reading and thinking. Television wasn’t an option because at the time his command of the French language was, he says, awful. But during that thinking time he had the germ of an idea for a novel, based loosely on some of the more interesting and arguably bizarre incidents that he had experienced in his working life. Several months of chemotherapy followed, giving Chris plenty of time to keep working on the story. A week after completing the chemo he was back in hospital for the major operation and spent two weeks in recovery. He had the time and the motivation to flesh out the story and a few months later his debut novel Payback was published. Since then there have been two more, My Brother’s Keeper about a Catholic priest who has a crisis of conscience and now the latest, Celeste Three is Missing. The idea for the plot of that story arose out of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370. What, he wondered, if such a fate were to be suffered by a passenger-carrying space plane like the Virgin Galactic? And how could that come about? Putting together a credible plot for that premise led to the writing of the novel. Chris says that he is no longer retired, he now has a new career, writing novels to the background music of birdsong. It’s a tough life! More information at www.chriscalder.com.
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