Dangerous Games

by Lesley Grant-Adamson

A liar and a charmer, Jim Rush is a young American with a weakness for trouble. On the run from the British police - he's wanted for a murder he didn't commit - Jim finds a hideaway in St. Elena, a small Caribbean island where his English girlfriend, Jane, has secured them an invitation.
Quickly tiring of the snobbery and childishness of Jane's uppercrust friends, Jim feels trapped. On the one hand, he can't seem to avoid a paparazzo bent on snatching pictures of Princess Diana on a neighboring island; the photographer, Jim knows, would be well paid for a shot of the man on wanted posters throughout London police stations. On the other hand, to stay among Jane's set means enduring the taunts of an egotistical host and joining in their puerile games.
Jim can't resist playing a game of his own when he encounters a couple of small-time hustlers who claim to have found sunken treasure. When Jim attempts to turn the tables on these con men, the result is murder. Jim is once more a wanted man - and this time he may not get away so easily.

234 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1995

About the author

Lesley Grant-Adamson (nee Lesley Heycock) was born in Islington, north London in 1942, and spent most of her childhood in Trealaw in the Rhondda.

She now lives in Debenham, Suffolk, but during the 1980s and 1990s lived in Islington, the scene of several of her novels. Since 1968 she has been married to Andrew Grant-Adamson, a communications consultant and lecturer in journalism at City University and Westminster University. Together they wrote A Season in Spain (Pavilion), a portrait of the Alpujarra region of Andalusia where they lived from 1991-3.

She was educated at Dame Alice Owen School and then worked as a journalist in London and the provinces until the early Seventies when she joined the London staff of The Guardian. In 1981 she left The Guardian to write fiction.

She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Royal Society of Literature, the Welsh Academy, East Anglia Writers and the Crime Writers’ Association.

Reviews

[Amber Row · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is probably the worst book I have ever read. I can't quite believe it was published. It's completely bizarre to me. You form absolutely no attachment or opinion on any of the characters because you have no real sense of who they are. There is little to no background information and there are very few motives presented for anyone's actions. It is full of inconsistencies like the fact that the main character is meant to be an American, yet speaks like a Brit with talk of "swimming costumes " (vs bathing suits) and "rubbish" (vs garbage or trash). There are no transitions, something happens and you have no idea why, and it's over just as quickly. There is no flow, no creativity, nothing of interest what so ever. There is no mystery, no suspense, no humor, no clever writing. The sentences are always kept short as if the author has no attention span, or assumes we have none and might get lost if more than 12 words are strung together. The story is not told in one voice, it jumps around. I only finished it because it was very short and in a way I wanted to see if it might improve. I think I'll put it in the recycle bin because I can't bear to knowingly torment anyone else with it. The only thing it has going for it was a snappy title.