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Formats
Paperback Book Details
  • 11/2017
  • 9781781326671
  • 192 pages
  • $13.49
John Bowie
Author, Illustrator, Editor (anthology)
Untethered
John Bowie, author

Adult; Mystery/Thriller; (Market)

Whilst on witness protection, in 90s Bristol, John gets so bored, drunk and mad in the life handed to him, he creates an identity more interesting; re-inventing himself as a Private Investigator. With his first case handed to him on a plate from a neighbour to find the original femme fatale, Cherry, he needs to draw on the darkest recesses of his past to survive the present and question what it is to have an identity in the first place. Using every piece of what he can from what he is, was and will be – to find Cherry and him end up the one ‘on top’.

Touring the clubs, pubs, offices and rainy streets of Bristol in the late nineties; over the Bridge into to Wales and back again to find her, himself and a motive.

John Bowie grew up on the coast in rural Northumberland, a region steeped with a history of battles, Vikings, wars and struggles. These tales and myths fascinated him as a child, and then as an adult. In the mid to late nineties he studied in Salford enjoying the bands, music, clubs and general urban industrial-ness of Greater Manchester, including the club scene and the infamous Hacienda. He was also there when the IRA bomb went off in 1996.

John’s writing is semi-autobiographical, a dirty realism and crime-noir. Ghostly references to a heritage that includes the Vikings, Scotland, Ireland and the North, flavour the words throughout, often with a dark but humoured edge.

Although inspired partly by 50s pulp hardboiled detective fiction and the beat generation authors and poets, John aims to celebrate his female characters from his real life through his writing, whilst retaining the hard drinking, cynical honesty and accessible writing style of these genres. John lives in Bristol with his wife and daughter, where he has been since the late nineties. He is a professional designer, artist and writer as well as a proud husband, father, brother and son.

Reviews
Set in 1998 in Bristol, England, Bowie’s dark, hard-edged crime novel inaugurates a promising series. The 27-year-old man calling himself John Barrie, “drunk, bored and alone,” has just started “another nondescript corporate job” as part of a witness protection program, but finds working with “repressed zombies” hard to stomach. Since he can’t externalize his true feelings without risk, John is unable to benefit from the therapy his minders have arranged, and he gets through his days self-medicating with alcohol. Then John’s brutish neighbor, whom John has dubbed Sean the Bastard, asks for help finding his missing girlfriend, Cherry O’Neill. Although John’s door just happened to be the first one Sean banged on, John takes advantage of the request to pose as a private investigator and agrees to search for Cherry. Bowie’s delayed reveal of John’s past proves an effective way of undermining the reader’s feelings about the lead, who becomes surprisingly sympathetic, with an inner life complex enough to sustain future books. Noir fans will find a lot to like. (BookLife)
Formats
Paperback Book Details
  • 11/2017
  • 9781781326671
  • 192 pages
  • $13.49
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