New Release Spotlight & Excerpt: A Greater God by Brian Stoddart

A Greater God by Brian Stoddart

Paperback: 362 pages

Publisher: Selkirk International Pty (30 Nov. 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0648393801

ISBN-13: 978-0648393801

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Superintendent Chris Le Fanu returns to Madras from Penang where he leaves his new Straits Chinese love interest, Jenlin Koh, and a tempting new post in police intelligence there. He finds Hindu-Muslim tension on the rise in Madras, and his friends and subordinates Mohammad Habibullah and Jackson Caldicott at loggerheads as a result. A series of Muslim murders around the Presidency adds more tension. Le Fanu's arch enemy, Inspector-General Arthur "The Jockey" Jepson is reacting recklessly to the new conditions, then Le Fanu has to travel to Hyderabad where his former housekeeper and lover Roisin McPhedren is seriously ill. Le Fanu swings between his personal and professional challenges as a gang of revolutionaries and Hindu nationalists from North India travel south to aggravate the troubles. Le Fanu and Jepson clash head-on as the latter causes several policemen to be killed, and Le Fanu is losing support because his main civil service protectors are leaving Madras. Just as he seems close to overcoming all these problems, news arrives that Jenlin Koh is on board a ship reported missing near Ceylon. How will Le Fanu cope?

A GREATER GOD

As the shimmer on the horizon resolved into Madras city’s coastline, Le Fanu wondered yet again if his return was wise, having left Penang reluctantly with only unpleasant prospects awaiting here. And this voyage back across the Bay of Bengal to India on the SS Ekma was joyless, unlike the one out to the Straits Settlements on which he met Jenlin Koh. The following weeks had passed in a blur, but now here he was while she remained in Penang – ‘The Pearl of the orient’ – expecting to visit Madras sometime but with no date fi xed. Would his life ever be straightforward?

Oddly, though, leaning on the rail and watching the city loom up was still somehow like coming home. He should have expected that. Madras had been his home for twenty years, since 1905, apart from the five away at what he could never call the ‘Great’ War. He was comfortable here. His British memories involved family strains, unhappy experiences and a failed marriage. India had certainly changed since his arrival but, despite rising calls for political independence, Gandhi’s mass civil disobedience campaigns, British India’s obdurate response and his own allegiances being challenged by a growing sympathy for India’s cause, the place still mesmerised him.

He picked out the wharves and buildings in what was now one of India’s largest ports. That was a big British achievement in the south. In earlier days, ships were serviced by small lighters that pitched up directly onto 2 A Greater God the sands. The nineteenth-century Charles Hunt prints gracing most Madras mansions depicted boats, crew and luggage tossed by the waves, passengers struggling to reach land both dry and in style. Madras had no natural harbour. Storms smashed piers and enclosures, tides and currents silted entrances in the first attempts to create one. However, Sir Francis Spring’s rule at the turn-of-the-century Madras Port Trust transformed everything.

In true British style, he also established the elitist Royal Madras Yacht Club in the harbour precinct, an incongruous Cowes on the Bay. Another attempt to make India something it was not.

The city’s smells and sounds increasingly filtered across on the breeze as the Ekma eased closer. Ahead, Le Fanu glimpsed the upper levels of Fort St George, Britain’s south Indian power base ever since Sir Eyre Coote saw off the French in 1761. These days it housed the Secretariat for the Madras Presidency whose forty-three million inhabitants matched the United Kingdom’s entire population. He would visit there later today and confront the Indian Civil Service mandarins.

Away on the left stood the Chepauk Palace, built by the Muslim Princes of Arcot but stolen mid-nineteenth century by the British. The Board of Revenue skulked there now, tax gatherers who fancied themselves above the Secretariat bosses. The mutual disdain between these two forces was legendary. Le Fanu hoped not to appear at Chepauk anytime soon, or before First Member Arthur Jamieson.

To the right, First Line Beach and the great trading firms that flourished on the ocean trade spurred by Spring’s harbour. Behind those imposing buildings lay George Town proper. Until 1911 it was called Black 3 Brian Stoddart Town, as in ‘home of the blacks’ even though Indians were not black. The British Empire’s ruling classes applied that term automatically to all non-whites everywhere. Le Fanu knew too many police and civil service officers who held that view – recusants all, irked, outraged and challenged by rising demands that Indians receive more political power and by London’s reluctant, cautious agreement. Madras Europeans were among India’s most vociferously conservative, a further source of his rising discomfort.

More cheerfully, he would soon visit Acharappan Street and his chef friend Krishna Rao who ran the city’s best Udipi restaurant. Penang’s south Indian food was excellent. So were its Chinese and Malay counterparts and all the hybrids. But he had missed his friend’s fare.

Brian Stoddart is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who is now based in Queenstown, New Zealand. Born and educated a Kiwi he has worked around the world as an academic, university executive, aid and development consultant, broadcaster,commentator and blogger.

He works as an international higher education consultant and has worked on programs in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Syria and Jordan as well as in the UK and USA. This work follows a successful career as university researcher, teacher and senior executive which culminated in a term as Vice-Chancellor and President of La Trobe University in Australia where he is now an Emeritus Professor. That academic career took him all over the world including long periods in India, Malaysia, Canada, the Caribbean, China and Southeast Asia.

He has written extensively on sports history, politics and culture as well as on India and south Asia in which field he completed his PhD. 

Most recently he has begun writing on his contemporary experiences, beginning with his life in an old house in the Old City of Damascus immediately before the upheavals of 2011-12. 

He is now also a crime novelist. A Madras Miasma was the first in a series of books set in 1920s Madras in India, and featuring Superintendent Chris Le Fanu. The Pallampur Predicament was the second and A Straits Settlement has appeared in 2016 as the third.

He also writes extensively for mainstream and new media as well as expert commentary for press, radio and television. Brian is also a cruise ship lecturer, specialising in international affairs and history.

In his spare time, he enjoys photography, reading (especially crime fiction),travel to new places, and listening to music, especially gypsy jazz

Twitter @BrianStoddart

Website: http://www.brianstoddartwriter.com/

Spotlight and Excerpt: Facing A Twisted Judgement by K.J. McGillick

Facing A Twisted Judgment by K.J. McGillick

What happens when tunnel vision clouds a police investigation? Is it true that once you are labeled a person of interest you really are the prime suspect? Can you trust the legal system? Probably not.

After a bitterly contested legal battle over inherited property, the hard-won art collection and its owner Samantha Bennington disappear. Both have vanished without a trace.

When blood spatter is discovered under the freshly painted wall of the room in which two of the paintings were hung, the theft becomes the opening act in a twisted tale of jealousy, revenge, and murder leading to a final judgment for all involved.

As the list of suspects narrows, the focus lands squarely on the husband. Some labeled Samantha’s husband a corrupt attorney, others an opportunist. Either way, he’s in the crosshairs of law enforcement and they are calling him a murderer. But is he the only viable suspect? What about the missing woman’s drug-addicted sister and her convicted felon brother? Both were furious over their loss at court and have more than enough reason to hate Samantha.  

Guilty until proven innocent leaves Alexander Clarke facing a twisted judgment.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KN85YK4

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07KN85YK4

 I’d reached a crossroad. If I argued with her, she might want to rethink her plans to marry me and think we might not be compatible after all. Or I could wait, and once married, I could catch her in a vulnerable position and make her see things my way. Yes, that was the better plan.

“Well, that is very noble and something worth considering,” I said.

We were about to have another drink of champagne when we heard a pounding at the front door along with the simultaneous ringing of the bell. Then, the shouting began.

Marley.

“Open up the fucking door,” she pounded.

“Call the police,” I said to Samantha. “We are not dealing with this tonight.”

As she was about to answer, we heard the crashing of something that sounded like glass or maybe pottery.

“Shit.” I was on my feet, running toward the door.

When I opened it, I saw a broken flowerpot and dirt scattered on the porch. Marley was tearing through what once had been flowers in the jug. Possibly looking for a weapon from the broken pottery.

What the hell?

She was screaming over and over, “I want my money. I want my fucking money.”

Sam ran to stop her when Marley picked up a shard of the broken vase.

“Come near me, bitch, and I’ll cut you.”

She was clearly drunk and probably high. Her pretty face was streaked with mascara, and her wild red hair gave her a comical appearance, as if she were Bozo the Clown’s sister. Her breath stunk of beer and whiskey.

“Oh my God, you’re drunk, and you drove here like this? What’s wrong with you? You could have killed someone. I’m calling you an Uber,” Sam said.

“I’m not leaving here without my m-m-money,” she slurred.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Sam replied, trying to move a little closer.

“And you! You are a fucking cold, bastard gold digger. You’re not getting a penny from me for lawyer fees,” she said, now waving the piece of ceramic my way.

My motto had always been never to argue with toddlers and drunks. I stood there, crossed my arms, and let her continue her rant.

“And the Campendonk is mine. I helped Grandpa pick that out. You have no right to it,” she screamed.

Then, I broke my own rule. “Marley, your grandfather knew, if he left you in charge of any money, you’d spend it on party drugs. You’d sell the painting for a song—” I said.

“This is none of your business,” she screamed and lurched forward.

I put my hand out to stop her, and she swiped my arm with the pottery shard, drawing a trickle of blood.

“That’s it. Uber or police?” Sam said, standing up to look at the cut.

“Neither,” she said, and before anyone could stop her, she raced to her car and drove away.

“Call the police and report her driving drunk while I wash this cut,” I said.

She hesitated as she assessed my arm.

“Sam, that woman is dangerous. You need to call the cops,” I reinforced.

“What, to embarrass her more? It’s only a few miles on a secluded road. Leave her be,” Sam said.

“I’m not comfortable with your decision, but she’s your sister,” I said.

A sober Marley was trouble. But a drunk Marley was a disaster.

K. J. McGillick was born in New York and once she started to walk she never stopped running. But that's what New Yorker's do. Right?

As she evolved so did her career choices. After completing her graduate degree in nursing she spent many years in the university setting sharing the dreams of the enthusiastic nursing students she taught. After twenty rewarding years in the medical field she attended law school and has spent the last twenty-four years as an attorney helping people navigate the turbulent waters of the legal system. Not an easy feat. And now? Now she is sharing the characters she loves with readers hoping they are intrigued by her twisting and turning plots and entertained by her writing.

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