LoveReading Says
A Maxim Jakubowski selected title.
Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2013.
The eponymous character in this slick thriller, also shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, is a crook, a man who works in the shadows and is brought out into the open after a heist goes badly wrong. The plot runs like a precision scalpel and moves between Asia and the shadowy zones of American cities as a frantic race against time unfolds to the echoes of gunshots, plots and counterplots and multiple betrayal. You can almost see the movie unfold in front of your eyes as you read. Damn exciting and precision-engineered thrills galore.
Roger Hobbs said: "I'm exceptionally honoured to have won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. It's a dream come true. This award puts me in the company of so many writers I admire, like Steve Hamilton, Gillian Flynn, and Jeffery Deaver. When I was writing this book in the basement of my college library, scrounging off old pizza and bad coffee, I never imagined I'd end up here. I want to offer my sincerest thanks to all the family, friends, and co-workers who helped me make this dream possible."
CWA Judges' comment: “An assured and engaging novel which maintains suspense throughout and grips the reader to the very end.”
Maxim Jakubowski
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Ghostman Synopsis
Stunningly dark, hugely intelligent and thoroughly addictive, Ghostman announces the arrival of an exciting and highly distinctive novelist.
When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from someone who's occasionally called Jack. While it's doubtful that anyone knows his actual name or anything at all about his true identity, or even if he's still alive, he's in his mid-thirties and lives completely off the grid, a criminal's criminal who does entirely as he pleases and is almost impossible to get in touch with. But within hours a private jet is flying this exceptionally experienced fixer and cleaner-upper from Seattle to New Jersey and right into a spectacular mess: one heister dead in the parking lot, another winged but on the run, the shooter a complete mystery, the $1.2 million in freshly printed bills god knows where and the FBI already waiting for Jack at the airport, to be joined shortly by other extremely interested and elusive parties. He has only forty-eight hours until the twice-stolen cash literally explodes, taking with it the wider, byzantine ambitions behind the theft. To contend with all this will require every gram of his skill, ingenuity and self-protective instincts, especially when offense and defense soon become meaningless terms. And as he maneuvers these exceedingly slippery slopes, he relives the botched bank robbery in Kuala Lumpur five years earlier that has now landed him this unwanted new assignment.
From its riveting opening pages, Ghostman effortlessly pulls the reader into Jack's refined and peculiar world-and the sophisticated shadowboxing grows ever more intense as he moves, hour by hour, toward a constantly reimprovised solution. With a quicksilver plot, gripping prose and masterly expertise, Roger Hobbs has given us a novel that will immediately place him in the company of our most esteemed crime writers.
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