The Murder Exchange

Shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculiar Best British Crime Paperback Award 2005

Shortlisted in the US for the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel 2004

When ex-mercenary Max Iversson is introduced to nightclub owner Roy Fowler, he senses immediately that the man’s trouble. Fowler wants security for a meeting with a group of ‘businessmen’ who are looking to buy his club. Five grand for a couple of hours work is too tempting a proposition to turn down, so Iversson, who now runs his own firm of freelance bodyguards, takes the job.

But when he and two colleagues accompany Fowler to a deserted north London industrial estate to exchange the deeds for the money; it turns out to be not so much a double-cross as a bloodbath. Three men end up dead, and Iversson only just gets out alive. Now he wants to know who’s behind the killings.

So begins a hunt for answers that will take him into dangerous territory, and also into direct conflict with Detective Sergeant John Gallan. Gallan’s investigating the fatal poisoning by snakebite of a doorman who worked at Fowler’s club. Leads are scarce and when they do appear, so do bodies.

But Gallan keeps digging away, unearthing in the process a murderous conspiracy that could provide the solution not just to this investigation but to another, more heinous murder that’s been lying among the ranks of the unsolved for a long, long time. Unknown to each other, he and Iversson are also heading towards a final confrontation from which neither man is likely to emerge in one piece.

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Download the first two chapters of 'The Murder Exchange'. (PDF)