The Bonus Boys

When go-getting Scottish journalist Rosanna Nixon sets up an interview with glamourous, "rich bitch and all-round genius" Thea Astley she sees it as a smooth and easy route to getting her chaotic life back on track.

With one friend newly buried, her love affair with Andrew Forbes on the rocks and nowhere to live, a saleable story on Thea would be the quick-fix she urgently needs.

While Rosanna is finalising her appointment at Astley's gated mansion in the mega-rich community of hedge fund managers, career criminals Joe Benson and Mac Skirton are lining up a devious third partner for a late-night burglary of the Astley home for the treasures they believe it contains.

Their raid turns into a brutal drug-induced assault. Thea and her elderly parents are horrifically mutilated and sexually defiled - and Rosanna is the first to discover their bloodied bodies.

Instead of a cosy colour supplement feature, she is now the news herself - and also one of the prime suspects in the eyes of a local police force that stumbles from one blunder to another.

As she tries to keep one step ahead of the police Rosanna digs ever deeper into a brutal world of corruption, bribery, battered wives and devious politicians as the body count rises and her own life is on a knife-edge.

The Bonus Boys is a rattling, fast-moving yarn with surprises and cliff-hanger moments on almost every page.

Praise for Jan Needle

'The book is compelling for its vivid, racy narrative ... it's also a serious attempt to use the thriller genre to analyse the forces in our society that have combined to create the prison crisis. Its exposure of the way that Whitehall manipulates the media has a chilling authenticity . . . it will appeal equally to conspiracy and cock-up theorists.' - Guardian

'Needle displays a firm grasp of institutions and their traps, exposes expediency and self-interest masquerading as government, and reveals a Britain regressing to the dark days of Dickens.' - The Times

'A cracking good read.' Tony Parker, New Statesman and Society

'A compulsive read that feeds your paranoia.' - Roger Graef The Police, Closing Ranks, The Secret Policeman's Ball.

'I found myself being drawn back into that twilight world again, despite myself. I was grossly entertained and thrilled.' - Jimmy Boyle, A Sense of Freedom, Pain of Confinement: Prison Diaries

Jan Needle, is an English author who writes under several known pseudonyms. He was born in 1943 and grew up in the naval dockyard town of Portsmouth on the south coast of England, in a family with strong naval and military connections. He has written more than thirty novels, as well as books and plays for adults and children, books of criticism, cartoons and radio and television serials and series.


Genre: Mystery