Blog Tour – ‘Wicked Game’ by Matt Johnson

It’s my turn today on the ‘Wicked Game’ blog tour.  I have an extract for you, but first here’s what this book is about.

 

Book Blurb

2001. Age is catching up with Robert Finlay, a police officer on the Royalty Protection team based in London. He’s looking forward to returning to uniform policing and a less stressful life with his new family. But fate has other plans. Finlay’s deeply traumatic, carefully concealed past is about to return to haunt him. A policeman is killed by a bomb blast, and a second is gunned down in his own driveway. Both of the murdered men were former Army colleagues from Finlay’s own SAS regiment, and in a series of explosive events, it becomes clear that he is not the ordinary man that his colleagues, friends and new family think he is. And so begins a game of cat and mouse – a wicked game – in which Finlay is the target, forced to test his long-buried skills in a fight against a determined and unidentified enemy.

Wicked Game is a taut, action-packed, emotive thriller about a man who might be your neighbor, a man who is forced to confront his past in order to face a threat that may wipe out his future, a man who is willing to do anything to protect the people he loves. But is it too late?

 

Extract

As the glass from the broken window sprayed around me, I hit the gas.

The gearbox of the Rover kicked down, the powerful engine quickly putting space between me and the gunmen.  I must have been doing eighty.  It was too fast. The lane was narrow, high verges and thick hedges.  If I met another tractor around the next bend I wouldn’t  need to worry about my pursuers.

I searched my mind for an idea of what to do.  I was a soldier and, supposedly, a trained driver.  This should be a simple choice: run or fight.  Adrenaline was preparing my body but clouding my thoughts; I tried to order them: if I crashed the terrorists would have me cold.  So that was it, running wasn’t an option.  I eased off the speed.  There was nothing for it: I would have to meet them.  But it would be on my terms.  A plan began to take shape in my mind.  I had to have an edge over them.  What I needed was a nice blind bend.

I guess I was maybe a hundred yards in front when I found one.  There were high trees on both sides with steep banks in front of them.  If I stopped, the Cortina driver wouldn’t be able to get past me.

As I rounded the turn, I hit the brakes hard then yanked up the handbrake and swerved.  The Rover slewed across the lane with the driver’s door facing away from the oncoming Cortina.

 

 

About Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson served as a soldier and Metropolitan Police officer for twenty-five years. Blown off his feet at the London Baltic Exchange bombing in 1992, and one of the first police officers on the scene of the 1982 Regent’s Park bombing, Matt was also at the Libyan People’s Bureau shooting in 1984 where he escorted his mortally wounded friend and colleague, Yvonne Fletcher, to hospital. Hidden wounds took their toll. In 1999, Matt was discharged from the police with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. While undergoing treatment, he was encouraged by his counsellor to write about his career and his experience of murders, shootings and terrorism. One evening, Matt sat at his computer and started to weave these notes into a work of fiction that he described as having a tremendously cathartic effect on his own condition. Matt is currently working on a sequel Deadly Game.

 

‘Wicked Game’ is available to buy from Amazon UK – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wicked-Game-Robert-Finlay-Johnson/dp/1910633410/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1458628064&sr=1-1