Brad rose to his feet, grabbed the spade from her hands and held it tightly.
Then he turned to face the oncoming people running their way, and stood before them with the spade held like a baseball bat. The crowd quickly stopped advancing. Some backed away, even ran. But some of the bigger men pressed on. Brad stood there in a pose of defiance, ready to fight. But that was not his intention, Karl knew. He was giving the crowd a sight to behold, a lasting image. A tale to tell. Nobody had seen Liz with the spade. The police would find a dead man in the grave and learn of a lunatic who brandished a spade like a weapon, and they would have their story.
Brad let them get close enough to make damned sure nobody got the wrong idea. To make sure they saw his face. Then he dropped the spade, turned, and ran.
His departing shout back, for all to hear, was: ‘I’m sorry.’
They would report that, too. A dozen witnesses would claim that the killer had shouted his regret at what he’d done. It would be considered further proof that Brad Smithfield had murdered Mick McDevitt, former cop, former friend, fellow death-dealer.
Karl’s statement would say the very same thing. But it would be a lie.
Brad’s words, he knew, had been for Liz.
* * *
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A Letter from Jake
Dear Reader,
I want to say a huge thank you for choosing to read The Choice. If you did enjoy it, and want to keep up-to-date with all my latest releases, just sign up here. Your email address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Would you stop on a dark road to help someone in trouble?
With The Choice, I wanted to create a high-concept thriller that had a simple but compelling premise. Thrillers work most powerfully when the reader can imagine the same thing happening to them, especially if it’s because of one, spur-of-the-moment choice. A choice you know you’d make the same way if you were in Karl’s position.
I wanted to create tension from simple scenes, without the need for fireworks, and I hope I achieved this. I hope you read this with a shaking hand, laughed at all the right times, and felt for Karl throughout. I hope you wondered if Liz was hiding something but always sided with her. I even hope that you felt a measure of sympathy for Mick McDevitt, enough so that you became eager for his next scene. Maybe some of you even hoped he’d win in the end.
Mostly, though, I hope you have asked yourself the question at the centre of this novel: would you stop on a dark road to help someone in distress?
If in doubt, just remember that, thankfully, creatures like Mick McDevitt are rare.
I hope you loved The Choice and if you did I would be very grateful if you could write a review. I’d love to hear what you think, and it makes such a difference helping new readers to discover one of my books for the first time.
I love hearing from my readers – you can get in touch on my Facebook page, through Twitter, Goodreads or my website.
Thanks,
Jake
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to the entire Bookouture team for basically being fab. Kim, for good advice. Abi, for some choices made and good counsel. Christina, for taking a couch potato of a novel into surgery and delivering the Five-and-a-half Million Dollar Man (bit too arrogant of me to call it the full ‘six’). I’m sure none of the above will mind if I give a special shout out to Natalie who remembered some guy’s novel she read two years before, took a chance, and made all this possible.
My partner, Jennifer, and the three little ones, who had to put up with a guy sometimes giving more attention to gangsters and crooked cops who didn’t exist.