Prelude to “Evil”…
Inspector Steve Morgan writes:
I’ve always had a healthy respect for water. I’d been without water in Afghanistan; and I had too much of it in a London canal when a wanker tossed me in one, thinking I was dead. England has two coasts. Once I’d settled in Bristol, I thought about buying a small boat to sail on the Irish Sea; I thought it might be fun in the future to sail a bit with Kanzi and our kids, after all. But that dip in the North Sea waters off Newcastle-on-Tyne where most of her folks lived to bring in the body of a Chinese spy made me reconsider that idea to buy a boat.
I’m DI Steve Morgan, a copper in the Bristol constabulary (technically part of the Avon and Somerset Police District). When I got my first case there after saying goodbye to the Big Smoke (London is known for other things besides its polluted air and river with its associated tides and canals), I barely had an inkling about how much it related to one of Esther Brookstone’s cases and a Russian oligarch’s yacht anchored off Scotland’s eastern shore.
They say China and Russia are the West’s major autocratic enemies. I personally experienced that at a local level. The politicians in Parliament—or maybe more the PM?—have to worry about the national and international levels. My copper colleagues and I worry about the local fallout. Yet China and Russia, led by thugs as bad as any of our local ones, get involved in local crime and even encourage it—anything to destabilize a Western democracy to further their autocratic agendas.
And Britain is one big island. It has to worry about water too because crime so often reaches its shores via its ports, Bristol being one. West, east, south, and north there’s water, and that creates entry points for smugglers, spies, human and drugs traffickers, and other rough scrotes who put no value on human life.
The island is a target for hate groups as well because it sits right off the rest of Europe’s coast, and they tend to support each other (and are sometimes funded by China and Russia). The Luftwaffe tried to destroy Britain in WWII; fascists, external and internal ones, have tried to destroy it more recently. The worst crimes often occur when scurrilous thugs like those listed above join forces with the local hate groups—or are one and the same thing.
I’ve had to deal with all that during my short stay in Bristol. Water itself isn’t culpable of anything bad, so I can respect it more academically. By isolating the island somewhat, it has mostly protected the UK and its citizens, after all, just like I try to do. I don’t respect the thugs I must deal with, though. They don’t deserve my respect at all.
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“Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy. These three novels deal with some of the events and themes Inspector Morgan writes about above. In Legacy of Evil, Steve and his team tie up loose ends left over from Celtic Chronicles and tangle with a Russian oligarch. In Cult of Evil, they tackle an evil cult, but Steve is distracted by a terrorist out for revenge. In Fear the Asian Evil, China’s plan to destabilize British democracy is exposed as the team tracks down the shooter who attacked one of its members. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
