Excerpt from, "The shark that ate Tommy Shoalhaven"

On a spring morning of cloudless blue sky in Western Australia, a teenage boy is attacked in the waters off Cottesloe Beach by a massive great white shark, so beginning an oceanic odyssey.

Two years later, as another great white is the suspected culprit for a series of attacks along the same stretch of coastline, two local marine biologists think they see a pattern to the carnage and hatch a crazy plan of their own. But they’ll need some help.

Are you ready to enter the water?

A brief excerpt...

Nathan, at 26, was two years younger than Brian and both of them had been nowhere near the water on the day Tommy was taken, two years before. It still felt like yesterday in lots of ways. The mood around the club after that day was dreadful. People were fearful, disappointed and bitterly angry that they couldn’t participate in their respective sports – clean, upstanding and outdoorsy sports that highlighted both strength and spirit in a person. It was never discussed openly but this was the fact that irked people the most. This was their beach, their strip of water, and how dare some animal come in and just take one of them when it felt like it?

What the shark did was considered to be an immoral aberration – not evil, exactly, but close – and many took it very personally. But time is a cure-all and despite the near-miss with that bloke last year, it was only over the past six months or so that people had started to swim and paddle again with the same enthusiasm as before. Talk of sharks and big dangerous sharks, especially, was secretly frowned upon as being negative, although most club members couldn’t let it out of their minds completely. How could they? Tommy had been killed right here – right out the front – and how lucky had that bloke been, rushed in the shallows like that, last year? But, powering close to the coast on water that was milky-grey and as quiet as a churchyard made some things easy to forget.

‘Okay Nath’, let’s go mate,’ Brian encouraged his training partner. Nathan replied with a sharp, ‘Yep.’

During the first couple of circuits they’d talked intermittently about work, the club, the girls at the club and what they had planned for the weekend, but with a lap to go both men were panting hard and working harder. They had perfect ski conditions and the only sounds were the slap of paddle-on-water and their heavy breathing. They could see the bottom easily enough when they took the time to look. Nathan enjoyed the flecks of black reef that skirted beneath them as a tangible measure of their velocity. It felt good to be out there, although that would have changed had they known that, for the past twenty minutes, they were being stalked and analysed from beneath the surface.

Brian was paddling on the beachside of Nathan, only a few metres to his right, when the edge of his peripheral vision captured a rush of black beneath him that couldn’t have been reef. The giant shark rushed up at him, smashed into his shiny white surf-ski. In the most horrific moment of his life Brian was tossed into the air like a discarded doll with the vivid picture in his mind of a huge great white with the front half of his ski in its mouth. His world unravelled. In slow motion, he willed himself not to fall back into the water with the beast that was about to bite him in half. Winded and panic stricken, he hit the water at the same time as Nathan who fell off his ski when the shark crashed across his bow. Both men were now in the water with their greatest living nightmare....

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More coming soon!

the eBook will be available at.... 

Apple iBookstore (for ipad)

Amazon (for Kindle)

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Hardcopy via Amazon and Barnes & Noble...

love hock !

Brief extract from my upcoming'Hooker Handbook' novel.....

.......The month of July came and went without much fanfare. Raelene had left to go and have a baby, which I was delighted about, and a new driver came and went in the space of a week. He was a big unfriendly-looking man who used to sit in reception and stare at the girls as they flirted on the phone. I never saw him in action but I was impressed with Pip, the gorgeous manager, who did the sacking, apparently. I received most of the saga from Penn and Trish, who said he was one creepy mother fucker. They wanted Little John to come back, who the creep was intended to replace. Indeed, had monthly awards been given out to anyone in the agency for general stupidity, be they hookers, drivers or receptionists, Little John would have won the July Award in a unanimous points decision.

First strike : Refusing to come out of the casino and therefore desist at playing black jack, even after his girl came out of the booking. Gabriela, his now regular partner, it seemed, had to walk into the casino to fetch him. She found him sitting in front of $300 worth of chips and a bourbon and coke. Eventually she convinced him to drive her to their next booking, which he wasn’t happy about. Trace tore strips off him. I didn’t witness that tirade, which I was disappointed about, but I did refuse to walk into the casino and look for him, which Trace asked me to do, only because Gemma was at a booking around the corner. (She wasn’t happy with me either, for a few hours.)

Second strike: Why any driver might leave their wallet in the car was beyond me. Most girls were completely trust worthy, but not all of them, and not always because of their thieving natures. Courtney, the goofy smack fiend who I hadn’t seen for months, drove with Little John on a busy Friday night, mid-month, and either because of how out-of-it she was, which is what I suspected was the problem, or just because she needed the money, it was eventually discovered that she’d pocketed Little John’s wallet that he’d left in the console of his car while she was downstairs ‘sleeping’. I had no idea how it all played out, but to my disappointment Courtney was actually sacked, although not for the first time, apparently.

Third strike and The Icing on The Cake: Gabriela stormed into reception at about 1am with a remarkable tale that Penn later explained in full detail. What happened was this: Gabriela was inside ‘Tom’s’ place in Nedlands, and everything was going well. She and Tom had downed a couple of shots of Tequila on her arrival, they’d had a quick shower, and then they’d adjourned to his bedroom to get it on. Tom liked anal sex apparently, and he liked giving it in the standard fashion, ie- doggie style. And all that was grand. So, Gabriela was having a nice time and so was Tom. At one point, not far from Tom’s great moment of orgasmic arrival, Gabriela looked over her shoulder to render psychological support to her suitor, when she shrieked in horror. Peering in the window with his beady little eyes was her driver, Little John, himself, sprung like a doomsday chook in the hands of a hungry farmer who was wielding the axe. Gabriela started screaming out that she was going to kill the mother fucker, at the same time as a rather confused Tom began to orgasm. Amid Gabriela’s instant fury, which was exaserbated in the short term via Tom’s refusal to let go of her hips, given his current ejacuation, Little John disappeared from the window in a flash and, from all accounts, bolted for his vehicle. Bless his cotton socks, he knew he was fucked, and Brian was the one who picked up Gabriela from the house.
And so it came to pass that Little John was sacked, and peace returned to Galaxy Esorts until the first week of August.....

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the book is currently in the hands of the editorial team and will be out soon.

hock

www.nameguruapp.com