When the Killing Starts

(Paperback)

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Description

This gripping crime thriller pits the most savvy cop currently in the genre and his police dog against a band of mercenaries (Library Journal).

Reid Bennett, police chief of tiny Murphys Harbour in Canada, is looking forward to a months vacation. He plans to spend time with his girlfriend, Freda, and he might even get to go fishing with his dog, Sam. But then Norma Michaels, the wife of a rich businessman, turns up with a $25,000 offer: Find her twentyyearold son, Jason. He has run off with some mercenaries to train for overseas service and she is afraid she has lost him forever. Even though he is of age, she wants him found, and she will pay handsomely.

The mercenaries call themselves Freedom for Hire, and their leader is a cashiered sergeant from the British paratroopers who now styles himself Colonel George Dunphy. He was courtmartialed for brutality, forced out of the service, and stands ready to brutalize a bunch of young men while stealing their pay. Since people like Dunphy annoy Reid, he decides to take the jobdespite the minor risk of a few exSAS men with automatic weaponsbut he is more worried that the boy will not want to come home when he is found. There are lots of questions to be answered when he and his German shepherd head north on the hunt for a few good (or maybe bad) men.

Reviews

A series character worth watching for . . . fast moving, intriguing. Los Angeles Times

Danger, fullbodied characters, and enough detail about police work and survival techniques to complement Bennetts role as the most savvy cop currently in the genre. Library Journal

Author Bio

Ted Wood was born in Shoreham, Sussex, England. Throughout his life, he was a flier, a beat cop, a pin-boy, a soda-jerk, a freight porter, and an advertising hotshot. He also wrote dozens of short stories, hundreds of magazine articles, including two long-running humor columns, television plays, and one musical comedy. He had fourteen books, thirteen of them novels, published in Canada, the United States, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Japan. Wood was the author of the acclaimed Reid Bennett mystery series. As Jack Barnao, he also wrote the John Locke Mysteries: Lockestep, Hammerlocke, and Timelocke.

After being widowed, he married his wife, Mary, in 1975. He was the father of three, stepfather to another three, and granddad to a total of nine, counting steps and one step-step. Wood ran Whitbys Ezra Annes House bed and breakfast in partnership with Mary. He passed away in 2019.