Published by graham on Sun, 06/08/2025 - 14:50
G’day. I’ve surfaced to tell you a little about the next book. So here it is....
‘Kane’, the tenth of the Spoils of War series, takes the action to America. It’s the winter of 1941, a quiet Sunday in Washington DC. The news that the Japs are bombing the US Pacific fleet in Pear Harbour arrives at the White House in the early afternoon.
Quincy Kane, one of a handful of Secret Service agents bodyguarding President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is one of the first Americans to realise that his nation is at war. War, he intuitively understands, is shorthand for the world turned upside down. Not least his own.
Because Kane has history, and it comes calling in the shape of Lou Mahoney, a vivid, ambitious investigative reporter with a desk on the second floor of the Los Angeles Times. Lou and Kane have been enjoying a discreet but passionate affair dating back to Kane’s involvement in busting a gang of counterfeiters out in the City of Angels. And now, with America still reeling under the sheer weight of Japanese bombs, it’s Mahoney who steps off a coast-to-coast flight determined to use Kane’s priceless access to FDR to further her own career.
Happily, she catches Kane with his defences down. He’s been working twenty-hour days alongside the men who make America tick. He lives alone. He’s glad of Mahoney’s company. And so they pick up where they left off. In bed, thanks to exhaustion and numberless shots of Jim Beam bourbon, he shares choice cuts from the chaos of the last unforgettable days. Big mistake.
Mahoney’s exclusive account of a country and a President so suddenly at war – 1400 words bannered on the front page of the Los Angeles Times – makes big news. The finger quickly points at Kane for these indiscretions but Roosevelt is far too canny to discipline one of his favourite agents. Instead, this ex- Boston PD cop finds himself in the hands of Wild Bill Donovan, the moving force behind the new Office of Security Services. Despatched back to Los Angeles, he finds himself touching base again with the third of the novel’s major characters.
Gus Leaman, like Kane, is Secret Service. He occupies a scruffy, barely furnished apartment atop a reptile shop in Venice Beach from which he patrols the badlands of LA’s dark underbelly. He has a pet rhino-horned viper with whom he listens to Wagner. He dresses like a tramp. He speaks umpteen languages. He’s irresistible to certain kinds of women. And he reads the crazy world of Los Angeles like no one else in the city. ‘Any further west, hombre’, he tells Kane gleefully, ‘and you fall off the edge.’ You get the picture.
And so, in the hands of Quincy Kane, Lou Mahoney, and Gus Leaman, the novel quickly unfolds. In her spare time, Mahoney has caught the boxing virus. Matched against a semi-pro black fighter called Dolores, she takes a beating. A re-match, black-on-white, attracts hundreds of LA’s richest punters plus a commercial agent called José Cuesta who is possibly the worst decision that Lou Mahoney has ever made. The guy is seriously mobbed-up. He believes that anything in this showboat city is his for the asking. Including Mahoney.
After weeks of being itself punch-drunk, America settles to the serious business of coping with a war on two fronts. Being Japanese on the West Coast has suddenly become very bad news indeed. Thousands – despite being born and bred in America – are arrested and trucked away to incarceration camps. Another great story for Mahoney, the fast-rising star of the LA Times, and now, after the events of the rematch, a boxing sensation.
But the mad carnival that is Los Angeles is beginning to wear thin on Quincy Kane, who finds himself mano-a-mano with José Cuesta, Mahoney’s least favourite gangster. This has little to do with Kane’s two years at District 16, Secret Service code for the White House, but everything to do with an agent who so abruptly finds himself in a situation only Hollywood could invent.
‘Any further west, hombre, and you fall off the edge.’
‘Kane’ publishes in hardback on Thursday 19th June. Have a read. And then tell your mates.