Book Synopsis:
Two desperate criminals. Something she never saw coming. A searing suspense thriller from bestselling author Nick Louth
In Manchester, two hardened gang members on the run take Catherine Blake and her one-year-old son hostage at gunpoint. She is in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Held in a Transit van, Catherine needs a plan fast. But it means diving into her captors’ risk-drenched world, and playing them at their own game.
Catherine has been through cancer, miscarriages and five draining years of IVF in order to have her son Ethan. He is the most precious thing in the world. She may be terrified out of her wits, but she’d do anything to protect him. Anything, no matter the cost…
Brace yourself.
A nerve-shredding suspense thriller you won’t believe until you have experienced it yourself, Trapped is perfect for fans of Cara Hunter, JP Delaney and Rachel Abbott.
Trapped is available in ebook and paperback now. The ebook is currently only £1.99 and you can purchase a copy of both using the link below.
Extract:
Chapter One
This is my wife, Catherine, yesterday evening. Tuesday. You can see her, with a screwdriver, in the boot of our Nissan, trying to tighten the screws on the anchor points for the new child seat. I tell her that they are secure, the man at the shop who installed it told us so, and he is fully qualified. I’d already double-checked the seat too. Watched the video, read the instructions. Used all my strength to test the straps, wobbled it, tried to pull it loose. It was fine. But for her that wasn’t enough. When it comes to Ethan, nothing is ever enough. She fears that in a collision our one-year-old son could be catapulted from the back seat through the windscreen. Since Ethan arrived, Catherine has developed a tendency to worry about all sorts of things. Sometimes it is reasonable, sometimes not.
She is understandably anxious about the odd-shaped mole on her right shoulder. She frets about her figure, and the smile lines she has acquired at 41, and seems to be convinced that one day I will no longer find her attractive. She’s wrong. I will adore her to my dying day, I can guarantee that now. I love her corkscrew copper hair and her pale freckled skin, even though she hates it and wishes she were a dark-haired olive-skinned Italian.
Wishing you were something else, someone else, somewhere else. It’s so clear to me now that you have what you have, and you make of it what you can. That’s what matters. When the time comes, when you are tested. You never know when that will be. I didn’t know, and neither here does she, still working on that seat for our son. Look at her. She has no idea of what is going to happen in less than 24 hours. That would make her worry, no mistake.
That mole. Catherine survived skin cancer, you see. She knew about the risks. She never sunbathed, was rarely drawn to the beach, always wore a broad-brimmed hat and gallons of sunscreen when on our brief foreign holidays. She had been aware since childhood that with her milky skin and about as many freckles as a galaxy has stars that there would always be a chance of some malevolent sun-seared alien cell, splitting and growing in a forgotten corner of her epidermis. And she had always looked out for the arrival of that malignity. Believe me, she looked. I saw her after every shower, in front of the mirror. But it was a dab of pigment she noticed for the first time under the nail of her left little toe, just a smear of brown visible through the cuticle, when she was about to apply nail varnish. It didn’t even look like the moles you see on the chart. But better safe than sorry. The nail was removed, the offending clump of melanocytes excised and tested.
The test results were not good.
Acral lentiginous melanoma. Not benign. Malignant. Dangerous. Potentially lethal, that tiny little blot. It’s not related to sun exposure, so there was no blame on her (or us). Still, tests showed that it had spread to a lymph node on the foot. A sentinel node, that’s what they call them. Watching out for trouble. If that’s infected, then the next stage is worse. Stage III, they call it, like some tricky examination. Maths, Further Maths, Much Further Maths. Catherine had her entire lymph node basin removed from her foot and ankle. Basin – it’s a good description for what is an entire river system, carrying white blood cells to where they are needed, and taking toxins away. But hiding away amongst the toxins are cancerous cells, still alive. She was 38, and she was very brave about it. When under local anaesthetic she watched them peel back her creamy skin, remove the nodes, then stitch it almost invisibly back. The next nodes, the next basin, seemed to be uninfected. It was then a question of waiting. Cancer’s Russian roulette. That was when the question of having a child became more urgent. As she always said to me: ‘That’s what I was made for. To bring a new life into the world.’
And to protect it, Catherine. Against all the badness this world can throw at you. That’s why you survived cancer, Catherine. You have a job to do. I can’t help you now. No one can help you. It’s your task alone. I know the date and the time, and the place. But I can’t come back and warn you. God, how I wish that I could.
Tuesday. Almost eight in the morning, and she has to leave for work in half an hour. I’ve just finished getting Ethan up. Catherine is doing pilates, lying in the centre of the lounge listening to the CD, whose soft rainforest music is full of bird calls and pattering raindrops. Because of the time, she hasn’t bothered to put her leggings and leotard on. She’s just wearing shorts and an old T-shirt with a faint orange stain on one side that, I am now experienced enough to be sure, is baby vomit. The voice on the CD, all mid-Atlantic vowels and breathy enthusiasm, is enjoining her to be aware of her own body, its balance and alignment. ‘Make sure you are square-aware, and breathe, breathe in until you have expanded your ribcage to its maximum. Now hold it gently, and make a few slow pelvic tilts.’
Mindfulness seems out of reach though. She eyes me staring at her, and starts giggling. ‘Don’t. You know I can’t concentrate if you watch.’ More giggling. But I stay leaning in the doorway, my arms folded, a slight grin on my face as I listen to Ethan’s happy burbling from the bedroom. Her hips tilt, her tummy flattens, the puke patch creases. I see the tell-tale vibration in her diaphragm. Silent laughter.
‘Right, that’s it!’ She jumps up and chases me around the lounge. I let her catch me by the kitchen door, and she tickles me quite hard in the ribs. As I mock up a wounded expression, she stands on tiptoes to give me a slow languorous kiss. ‘Tonight. I promise. He’ll sleep better, even if I have to have a G&T before I feed him,’ she whispers.
‘You are going to drug our precious child?’ I say in faux horror.
She smiles and licks my neck. It’s a delicious feeling. ‘Maybe.’
I did get that promised act of lovemaking on Tuesday night.
It was wonderful.
It was my last.
About The Author:
Nick Louth is a bestselling thriller writer, award-winning financial journalist and an investment commentator. A 1979 graduate of the London School of Economics, he went on to become a Reuters foreign correspondent in 1987. It was an experience at a medical conference in Amsterdam in 1992, while working for Reuters, that gave him the inspiration for Bite, which was self-published in 2007 and went on to become the UK no. 1 Kindle bestseller for several weeks in 2014 before being snapped up by Sphere. It has sold a third of a million copies, and been translated into six languages. The terrorism thriller Heartbreaker was published in June 2014 and received critical acclaim from Amazon readers, with a 4.6 out of 5 stars on over 100 reviews. Mirror Mirror, subtitled ‘When evil and beauty collide’, was published in June 2016. The Body in the Marsh, a crime thriller, was published by Canelo in September 2017, with The Body on the Shore following in 2018. Freelance since 1998, he has been a regular contributor to the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle and Money Observer, and has published nine other books. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.
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