Backlash, was shortlisted for the CWA's John Creasey Award for the best first
crime novel of 2003.
With it's energetic pace, compelling style, gritty atmosphere and gripping plot
Breakbeat is the second novel from the acclaimed author of Backlash.
Daz Croxley. An unemployable, inner-city dwelling retro-punk. Illiterate because of
his dyslexia - but possessed of his own peculiar intelligence. Struggling to pay off his
corrupt landlord, Daz loots an electronics shop during an inner-city riot. Included in
his bounty is a handful of sequentially-numbered £20 notes.
Daz can't know that this money comes from a vastly larger hoard, the product of a
fraudulent property deal, a hoard for which men have already died. But others know.
The architect of the fraud for one - serving his jail term but still with a dangerously
long reach. Police officers - not all batting for the same team. Other criminals out for
what they can get.
When word leaks out that Daz knows the location of the money, his life and the lives
of his few real friends are in peril. His only hope is to play his pursuers off against
each other in a deadly game of bluff and double bluff.
Leicester-based Rod Duncan is a house-husband in his mid-
thirties, whose wife teaches English to asylum seekers. Born in Wales, Rod Duncan
moved to Taiwan in 1989, where he established an environmental education
development programme on behalf of the Baha'i community. He returned to live and
work in Leicester in 1993.
Further information at www.rodduncan.co.uk.
When humanitarian charity worker, Nicholas Hyde, defies Obligate, he knows he is creating a formidable enemy. For Obligate is a global transnational with far more power than is healthy, and everyone around Nick is doing what they are told and denying what they have seen with their own eyes.
But Nick is determined to seek the truth. And however much pressure is bought to bare Nick will not stop, until the atrocities being commited all around him in the twin names of progress and science are exposed in the fierce, clear light of day...
Paul McAuley is a former research scientist at Oxford University and UCLA, and a former lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University. This is his debut thriller and marks the arrival of a major British talent in this field.
Paul McAuley's first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, and his most recent novel, Fairyland, won the 1995 Arthur C Clarke Award for best SF novel published in Britain and the John W Campbell Award for best novel. In 1995 his short story 'The Temptation of Dr Stein' won the British Fantasy Award, and in 1996 his novel Pasquale's Angel won the Sidewise Award for Best Long Form Alternate History fiction.