Arthur Chigwell. Grieving father of a son brutally beheaded by Iraqi extremists in 2004, desperate for revenge on all those he holds responsible. Jarvis Collingwood. Ex-Army sniper, his own brother gunned down in front of him in Iraq. Cold, calculating and willing. Leon Deshpande. Specialist security adviser and investigator, used to getting his man, especially if the price is right. Naomi Lonsdale. Young and naïve, easily taken in and horribly used. The London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony. Dotted around the vast all of the gunman’s targets, enjoying an evening of spectacular celebration, little knowing how the night – or even their lives – will end. The London Sniper is a chilling contemporary thriller exploring the ultimate revenge.
-------------------------------- Daniel Pascoe is a new author, using the novel as a means to seek honest explanations for the often inexplicable. A Londoner born and bred, he has lived and worked in the north-east of England for the last twenty-seven years. He has never been in the Army and would never take up a rifle to kill anybody; he’s a pacifist; he’s a he looks after people, tries to make them better. He lives peacefully on Teesside with his wife, teenage daughters and cats, who all equally claim to be pacifists.
Daniel Pascoe was brought up in London in the nineteen-fifties and sent away to boarding school at 13. He had always wanted to be a doctor and trained in St Bartholomew’s Hospital. After a couple of post-graduate degrees, he worked as a cancer specialist the north-east of England for thirty years. Now retired he spends much of his time writing, far from the hubbub of city life, enjoying peaceful periods of contemplation and sometime playing the most golf. Constantly on the look-out for opportunities for pensive introspection, he likes fiction-writing for its distinct contrast; and its way of setting its own rules and telling its version of the truth. He uses the novel as a means of seeking honest explanations. He started writing stories at prep school, filling school notebooks with scribbled lines of nonsense, graduating to his father’s portable typewriter in his teens, still never quite completing anything. So, it has not been until much later with more time and experience to draw on, that he has tried to succeed in a world that has always fascinated him, creative and literary writing. Literary heroes from the past include Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Daphne Du Maurier, Somerset Maughan and HE Bates. In the contemporary world, the greatest novelists of our times, John le Carre, Cormac McCarthy and Hilary Mantel would be joined by favourite historical novelist, Dorothy Dunnett. But there are so many great authors to be found: Edna O’Brien, Salmon Rushdie, Sarah Waters, Ian McEwan, to name but a few. His efforts have all been self-published in one way or the other, having not yet found a literary agent supportive of his hybrid mix of literary and commercial writing. His novels are filled with well-drawn characters and the action often slow-burns before running headlong without stopping to dramatic often violent conclusions. He lives with his family on Teesside. The aim is to write during the dull winter months and read and research and play golf and walk the dogs during the summer, but actually he tends to be writing the whole time now, with a number of different projects on the go at the same time. Fortunately, the two dogs are small and fluffy and a couple of turns around the kitchen island is usually enough. One day he hopes to find an agent to help him propel his career into new and exciting areas.
It seems that his time as an army sniper has damaged Jarvis Collingwood. Struggling to find a place in civvy street, Jarvis accepts a dodgy job. It is an assassination, a revenge killing for a family that seeks justice. Given who the target is, Jarvis has no qualms. Unfortunately, the job spirals into more killings. Jarvis doesn't seem to care. He is emotionally stunted and fatalistic about it all. Being a sniper again seems to be his only justification.