The first Mike Barton
novel
by Ian Gosling
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The Puppet Master exercises power without conscience,
manipulating and destroying lives; because he can. It’s a game and he doesn’t
need reasons.
Ask him – Why? And he’ll answer – Why not?
Chief Inspector Mike Barton is going after the criminal organisation behind a
massive drugs and human trafficking operation. His team of investigators have
had the main targets under surveillance for months, but Barton still doesn’t
know the identity of the man who is pulling all the strings. Now he’s under
pressure from his bosses to move in and close the net. ‘We’ve got another
month.’ Within days an unexpected turn of events disrupts the Puppet Master's
plans, and in his efforts to regain control he sacrifices some of his closest
associates.
A trail of lies and corruption leads Barton through a dark underworld, where
human life is regarded as a commodity – traded for profit, abused for pleasure,
written-off for expedience – to a more secret, sinister place where behind their
façades of respectability greedy men have become willing puppets to satisfy
their lust for money and power.
The Puppet Master's acts of betrayal have sown the seeds of his own downfall and
he makes more mistakes as the police get closer. Driven by a ghost from his past
– taking risks and bending rules – Barton is rapidly uncovering the truth. When
he uncovers the darkest secrets of the Puppet Master’s double life, things get
personal - and in a dramatic conclusion, the stakes get higher.
The
Puppet Master was conceived out of a question. Every time I go on holiday to
the Costa del Sol there are more resorts, hotels, golf courses, villas and
apartments. I'd been out for a drive in the hills behind Marbella, and found
myself wondering - how much of this is paid for with dirty money?
The book started as a
story about organised crime and money-laundering, but as the characters took
over, they started to write another book. They told me their story and I just
filled in the pages
The Characters
Like most of us Mike
Barton is a flawed character. and anyone who knows me, will know where many
of his flaws come from. There is quite a bit of me in that particular melting
pot and perhaps even more of what I would like to be. I hope that you will like
him, although I know that at times he'll frustrate you.
Barton
is very good at his job, and he does it with a passion. Sometimes too much
passion and that's when he's at his weakest ... when the chip on his shoulder
becomes too much of a burden, when the ghost stirs to haunt him, when the Puppet
Master is tugging at his strings ... when he most needs his friends, he pushes
them away. Barton genuinely cares about the people around him and wants to do
the right thing by them – but it doesn’t always turn out that way. Would you
want him on your side? Almost certainly. Would you want him as a friend? -
That's for you to decide
Twisted, cruel,
psychopathic perhaps, a callous user of people - there is little if anything
that might redeem The Puppet Master. And he is also very good at what he
does; and he does it because he can, and without a thought for others.
Damaged as a child, the only lessons that he learned were to look after number
one and to hell with anyone else; and not to pity those less fortunate, but to
despise and abuse them. Would you want him on your side? – The only side he
takes is his own. Would you want him as a friend? – He doesn’t know the meaning
of the word.
The Settings
Place - The Puppet
Master takes you on a journey from London and the Home Counties, to Liverpool,
Edinburgh, Spain, the USA and a Caribbean island. The world that the characters
inhabit is an important element in any story and real locations have been used
wherever possible..
When choosing a book to read, other than that which is intended as fantasy, I am
naturally drawn towards those authors whose use real places. So it is not
surprising that my favourite authors include Ian Rankin, Colin Dexter and Arthur
Conan Doyle. I hope that I have managed to evoke a sense of place, and that
anyone familiar with a particular location will not have too much difficulty in
recognising it
Time – Set in 2003,
the book also looks into the past - back twenty years to the tragedy that still
haunts Barton, and a further forty years back to events in The Puppet Master’s
childhood that he cannot forget. And for both men,
the anaesthetic of
time has numbed the pain, but will never heal the wounds.
The Fight Against Organised
Crime
The events in
this book are the invention of the author, but the inspiration came from actual
reported cases. One only has to turn on the news or read a newspaper to know
that, unfortunately, real life can often be more terrible than fiction. The
criminal organisations involved in the illegal trafficking of drugs and human
beings are like cancers eating away at our society; making huge profits from
their trade in human misery and devastating the lives of countless numbers of
innocent people. Law enforcement agencies around the world are engaged in a
seemingly never-ending war, in which the enemy is assisted by modern
communications technologies, the growing global economy, corrupt
administrations, greedy businessmen and weak politicians.
At the time of
writing this book, in England, the main police agency in the fight against
organised crime was the National Crime Squad. Established in April 1998, the NCS
was responsible for many successful operations against international drug
trafficking, money laundering and organised immigration crime. In 2006 the NCS
was merged with a number of other agencies to form the Serious and Organised
Crime Agency (SOCA)
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