A Friend In Deed by G.D. Harper - Book Tour + Giveaway
A Friend In Deed
Britain: a few years from now. A new populist political party has won the recent general election.
Duncan Jones, freelance political journalist and blogger, loses his weekly column at a national newspaper and turns to investigative reporting. The chance remark of a friend leads him to suspect that the Russians are directing the new British government's policies and decisions. As he visits Moscow and Ukraine to discover more, scandal follows intrigue, dark forces attempt to silence him by whatever means possible and he turns to an unlikely ally for help.
A Friend in Deed is a fast-paced psychological thriller set in an all-too-believable near future. It is also the story of how one man confronts the traumas in his past and works out how to resolve them.
Purchase Links:
US - https://www.amazon.com/Friend-Deed-GD-Harper-ebook/dp/B07K3TJCSV
Author Q&A
Author Q&A
1.
What is the first book that made you cry?
Animal Farm by George Orwell. When Boxer gets taken off to the
knackers yard at the end. I read it when I was 14 and it made a big impression.
2. How long, on average, does it take you to write a book?
About
a year to write, then six months of editing to knock it into shape.
3. How do you select the names of your characters?
I put a lot of thought into
naming my characters and there is a lot of significance in my choice which I
imagine the reader doesn’t usually spot. Bobbie Sinclair was chosen because it
let me create a device where her controlling boyfriend always insists on
calling her the formal version of her name, Roberta, and she gets away with
taking a new identity by making her surname St Clair, claiming that her
employer misheard how she said it.
Michael is a nod to Michael
Corleone, as much of his story is reminiscent of the other Michael in The
Godfather, and I liked the alliteration of Michael Mitchell.
Duncan is my favourite name. I
initially chose Duncan, because I wanted a no-nonsense Scottish first name.
When he first really appears in the story, in Love’s Long Road in the 1970s, he’s a huge Bowie fan. I needed to
give him a surname and so called him Duncan Jones, the name of Bowie’s son. The
irony is that although my Duncan is a huge Bowie fan, the other Duncan was
called Zowie Bowie until the 1980s, so in the 1970s my Duncan wouldn’t make the
connection. Some readers have, though!
4. What creature do you consider your "spirit animal" to be?
A ginger
cat. They’ve been a talisman for me all my life and I named my eBook imprint
Ginger Cat Publishing
5. What are your top 5 favorite movies?
The Godfather Part One; 2001:
A Space Odyssey; Run, Lola, Run; Pulp
Fiction; Magnolia
6. If you were the last person on Earth, what would you do?
Write
a book about it. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about negative reviews.
7. What fictional character would you want to be friends with in real
life?
I think it has to be Bobbie, the twenty-two-year-old female main
protagonist in Love’s Long Road, who
has a supporting role in the other two books. She’s a real Marmite character,
some readers really empathise with her and like her, others roll their eyes and
get frustrated by her incredibly bad decisions. She is a composite of three
strong women I’ve met and admired at different times in my life and I loved
writing the story as her in the first person.
8. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Write! Don’t find ways to put off knuckling down to get words on the page
and don’t keep endlessly refining the first chapter. Set yourself a word count
you feel comfortable with (for me 1500-2000 words a day) and discipline yourself
to reach that word count every day. Even if you discard most of what you’ve
written the next day, it gets you in the groove and there will always be
something worth keeping.
9. What book do you wish you had written?
Anything
with beautiful, evocative descriptive passages that is not too heavy going. So Atonement by Ian McEwan, The hand that First Held Mine by Maggie
O’Farrell, Captain’s Corelli’s Mandolin
by Louis de Bernieres for example.
10. What
is the story behind your trilogy?
They’re all psychological thrillers, but in three
sub-genres. Love’s Long Road is a
coming-of age -story set in the 1970s about a young woman who leads a reckless
double life; Silent Money is a crime
novel also set in the 70s and is about an assistant bank manager who becomes a
ruthless crime lord; A Friend in Deed
is a political thriller set a few years in the future where an over-the-hill
journalist discovers that the Russians are controlling the new populist
political party that governs Britain.
What makes the books unique is that each story is
told from the point of view of a different one of the three main continuing
characters in the three books. They’re all stand-alone stories, but for
instance with Love’s Long Road and Silent Money, the same scenes and even
the same dialogue is in both books, but they have a completely different
meaning when seen from the point of view of the different characters.
11. Tell us 10 fun facts about yourself! :)
Met
my wife of 39 years at a student disco when I was 18, and was engaged six
months later.
Danced
on stage with Iggy Pop.
Been
an extra in the Mike Leigh movie Peterloo. I was massacred in the big crowd
scene at the end.
Ran
the London Marathon dressed as a Duracell bunny.
Doing
a book signing in Brighton, underneath a poster of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, I was asked if I was
actually Graham Greene.
Lived
in a tent for five months as I traversed the entire Nepalese Himalayas.
Climbed
250 out of the 282 Scottish Munros (mountains over 3000 feet). The rest to be
climbed in 2020.
Been
a bouncer and a roadie in late 1970s Glasgow, just as punk rock was arriving.
Cycled
around the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain on a three-person bicycle.
Author Bio –
I was placed third in the 2015 Lightship Prize for first-time authors, won a 2016 Wishing Shelf Award Red Ribbon, been shortlisted at the UK Festival of Writing for Best First Chapter, longlisted in the 2017 UK Novel Writing Competition.
In 2017, I was one of twelve authors selected for Authors in the Spotlight at the Bloody Scotland book festival in Stirling, showcasing who they considered to be the best emerging talent in crime fiction, and was the only self-published author to be chosen. I have spoken at numerous other book events, including Blackwells' Writers at the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; a stand-alone slot at the Byres Road Book Festival in Glasgow, and the Aye Write! Book Festival, also in Glasgow.
I worked in Russia and Ukraine for ten years, which gave me the ideas for the plot and setting that I used in A Friend in Deed.
Social Media Links – www.gdharper.com
Facebook: @gdharperauthor
Giveaway to Win all 3 paperbacks of GD Harper’s Psychological Fiction Trilogy (Open UK Only)
· Prize features all three books, Love’s Long Road, Silent Money and A Friend in Deed
*Terms and Conditions –UK entries welcome. Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below. The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over. Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data. I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.
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