Extracts from my debut novel, The Italian Connection

A beguiling tale which challenges normal assumptions about time, place and identity, as well as being an adventure story of high quality.

​A man awakes in a hospital bed to find he has the face and body of another person. He believes he is a young British soldier and the year is 1945 but all those around him insist he is a dangerous serial killer, and the year is 2000. Confused and disorientated he escapes and begins a journey through a world he does not understand. He is forced to confront ideas about spiritualism, mediumship, life after death, reincarnation and theories involving dual or multiple personality disorders. These themes are linked in a courtroom drama with a twist in the end. 

Read on for a taste of The Italian Connection...

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"I listened without interruption but nothing in what he said explained why in my head I was a twenty-seven year old man but the mirror revealed a man in his late fifties who bore no resemblance to my own mental picture of my own face." 

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“I don’t think I formally introduced myself,” he said, pouring the tea and laying the kettle down beside the sink. ” I’m Father Ignatius, Cornelius,  Flaherty, Catholic Priest, of this Parish, an alleged former member of the Irish Republican Army, and in days gone by a wanted man...” 

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"I’m not a literary person. True crime, detective novels, books on sport, that’s about my limit.”

“So! No poetry. No Blake, Shelly, Oscar Wilde?”

I laughed! “Where I come from poetry’s for sissies,” I said. 

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"If the tests concluded anything, they said I was a normal reasonable man.  I was the man on the Clapham omnibus. The man who rolled up his shirts sleeves on a sunny Sunday afternoon and mowed his lawn, whilst chatting amiably with his neighbour next door over the garden wall. How then, one could ask, could someone like this be confined in a mental institution?"

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”There’s an old saying that the higher up the tree the monkey goes the more you see of its arse and I’ve seen quite a few arses in my day.  So I suppose what I’m saying is I’m a cynical old bastard with a specific view on most things in the world.  I don’t believe anything a politician tells me, I have no religion or any of that other shit.  When you’re dead you’re dead and that’s an end of the matter as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know why we’re here and I care even less."

Available for purchase in paperback from Ringwood Publishing or as a Kindle eBook.