by Zoe Sharp
Zoë wrote her first novel when she was fifteen, but success came in 2001 with the publication of Killer Instinct – the first book to feature her ex-Special Forces heroine, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox. The character evolved after Zoë received death-threat letters in the course of her photo-journalism work.
Later Charlie Fox novels – First Drop and Fourth Day – were finalists for the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel. The Charlie Fox series has also been optioned for TV.
As well as the Charlie Fox novels, Zoë's short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, and have been shortlisted for the Short Story Dagger by the UK Crime Writers' Association. Her other writing has been nominated for the coveted Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, the Anthony Award presented by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the Macavity Award, and the Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers’ Association.
Zoë lives in the English Lake District. Her hobbies are sailing, fast cars (and faster motorbikes), target shooting, travel, films, music, and reading just about anything she can get her hands on. In what she laughingly refers to as her spare time, she and her husband self-built their own house.
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Meet Charlie Fox
The idea of a tough, self-sufficient heroine who didn't suffer fools gladly and could take care of herself is one I had lying around for a long time before I first wrote about Charlotte 'Charlie' Fox. The first crime and mystery books I ever read always seemed to be populated by female characters who were only any good at looking decorative and screaming while they waited to be rescued by the men!
I decided early on that Charlie Fox was going to be very different. She arrived almost as a full-grown character, complete with name, and I never thought of her any other way. At the start of the first book I wrote about Charlie, Killer Instinct, she is a self-defence instructor with a slightly shady military background and a painful past.
In Riot Act, Charlie has moved on to working in a gym, and comes face to face with a spectre from her army past – Sean Meyer. Sean was the training instructor she fell for when they were in the army together and she's never quite forgotten or forgiven him for what she saw as his part in her downfall. Sparks are bound to fly.
Close protection – the perfect choice
It's Sean who asks Charlie to go undercover to the bodyguard training school in Germany where the events of Hard Knocks take place. Charlie agrees as a favour to him, but gradually realises that close protection work is the perfect choice for an ex-Special Forces trainee who never found herself quite in step with life outside the army that rejected her.
By the time we get to First Drop Charlie is working for Sean's close protection agency and he accompanies her on her first assignment in Florida. By now she has come to terms a little with her violent abilities – or so she thinks. But then she's plunged into a nightmare in which she has to kill to protect her teenage principal.
Which is why, at the start of Road Kill, Charlie was a little in limbo about her life and her career in close protection. Until, that is, one of her closest friends is involved in a fatal motorcycle crash and she agrees to take on an unpaid bodyguarding job. She and Sean are soon drawn together to protect a group of thrill-seeking bikers on a wild trip to Ireland.
The second book to be set in the US, Second Shot, starts with a bang – or rather, two of them – when Charlie is shot twice and seriously injured in the course of her latest bodyguarding job in New England. The events of this novel strip away Charlie's usual physical self-assurance and leave her more vulnerable than ever before as she tries to work out what went wrong and still protect her client's four-year-old daughter from harm. Charlie is also forced to confront how far she's prepared to go in order to save the life of a child.
By Third Strike, Charlie and Sean are living in New York City and working for Parker Armstrong’s exclusive close-protection agency, where Sean has become a junior partner.
In this book, I really wanted to finally explore Charlie’s difficult and often destructive relationship with her parents – and in particular with her father. Charlie has to protect her mother and father from harm at all costs, but is hampered by trying not to let them witness just how cold-bloodedly their daughter must act in order to be effective at her job. It puts her in an often impossible situation, brings her relationship with Sean to an explosive head, and causes her father to reveal a side of himself everyone will find disturbing.
Not only that, but the story ends with big questions over Charlie’s entire future.
By the start of Fourth Day, where Charlie, Sean and Parker Armstrong are planning a cult extraction in California, Charlie has still not solved the problems that arose during the previous book – nor has she found the courage to explain it all to Sean. When she volunteers to go undercover into the Fourth Day cult, she’s looking as much for answers about her own life as about the man who died.
It's this battle with her own dark side that is one of the most fascinating things for me as a writer about the character of Charlie Fox. I wanted a genuine female action hero, but one who had a convincing back story. I've tried to ensure she stays human, with all the flaws that entails – a sympathetic character rather than just a 'guy in nylons' as someone described some tough heroines in fiction.
In Fifth Victim − involving a deadly kidnap plot among the jet-set of Long Island − there are complications with Sean’s ongoing condition, and Charlie’s increasing awareness that her boss, Parker, views her as so much more than a mere employee. Charlie is forced to make decisions this time out that will change her life forever.
Sean is very much a key element in the events of Die Easy, which sees him and Charlie in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina guarding an attendee at a glittering charity fundraiser. The idea of this book was to put Charlie in a situation where she was very much at a disadvantage. She finds herself unarmed and handicapped not only by having two civilians to protect but also worrying about a still way-below-par Sean, and coming face-to-face with an unpleasant reminder of their army past. It tests Charlie’s moral compass as much as her courage and resourcefulness.
Between book ten, Die Easy, and the next in the series I wanted to fill the gap with another outing for Charlie, and also to explain what was happening to the relationship between Charlie and Sean. Initially I thought a short story might suffice but the idea grew until it became a novella, Absence of Light. This sees Charlie tasked as security advisor to a specialist team sent in to lead rescue and recovery efforts after a major earthquake. Meanwhile, the events of Fifth Victim have come back to haunt her − and Sean. For the resolution to that, readers will have to wait until the next instalment . . .
The instinct and the ability to kill
Characters who live on the fringe have a certain moral ambiguity that we find seductive, I feel. Charlie has that obscurity to her make-up. She discovers very early on that she has both the instinct and the ability to kill. And although she does it when she has to and doesn't enjoy what it does to her, that doesn't mean that if you push her in the wrong direction, or you step over that line, she won't drop you without hesitation.
Dealing with her own capacity for violence when she's put under threat is a continuing theme throughout the books. It's not an aspect of her personality that Charlie finds easy to live with – a difficulty she might not have if she was a male protagonist, perhaps? Even in these days of rabid politically correct equality, it is still not nearly as acceptable for women to be capable of those extremes of behaviour.
But Charlie has evolved out of events in her life and, as you find out during the course of the series, things are not about to get any easier. I do rather like to put her through it! She's a fighter and a survivor, and I get the feeling that if I m
et her I'd probably like her a lot. I'm not sure she'd say the same about me!
Although I've tried to write each of the Charlie Fox books so they stand alone, this is becoming more difficult as time goes on and her personal story overlaps from one book to the next. I'm always expanding on her back story, her troubled relationship with her parents and her even more troubled relationship with Sean, who was once her training instructor in the army and, when she moves into close protection, he then becomes her boss. He continues to bring out the best and the worst in her. And their relationship is becoming ever more complicated as the series goes on . . .
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Copyright © Zoë Sharp 2013
First published in Great Britain 2013
This edition published by Murderati Ink [ZACE Ltd] 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author, nor otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published.
All characters and events in this novel and excerpts, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-909344-33-4
www.ZoeSharp.com
Contents
Jacket copy
Title page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
From the Author’s notebook
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Bonus Material
Don’t miss the bonus material at the end of THE BLOOD WHISPERER:
The other Charlie Fox novels and short stories
Meet Zoë Sharp
Meet Charlie Fox
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