* * *
Thriller writer and former SAS trooper Andy McNab says that my book The Chinaman is one of his top five favourite thrillers. It’s about a former Viet Cong fighter who switches sides during the Vietnam War but gets left behind by the Americans. Quiet, hard-working and unassuming, he was building up his South London take-away business. Until the day his wife and youngest daughter were destroyed by an IRA bomb in a Knightsbridge department store. Then, simply but persistently, he began to ask the authorities who were the men responsible, what was being done. And was turned away, fobbed off, treated as a nuisance. They called him the Chinaman and refused to help. Which was when the Chinaman, denied justice, decided on revenge. And went back to war. In some ways it’s a prequel to The Bombmaker. Here are the first few chapters -