Spotlight: False Connections by Steve Sheppard
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Genre: Thriller, Action
Three years ago, Mel Milano was an MI5 intelligence officer with a promising career. Then, during a routine protection and surveillance operation in Wales, things went drastically wrong and three people died, including Mel’s partner and fiancé, Liam Webster.
Drummed out of the service on trumped-up charges by MI5 Deputy Director, Sarah Brook, Mel lost her career, her self-respect, her confidence and her fiancé. Nothing made sense.
Three years on, she is rebuilding her life, working for a private security outfit.
But she’s never forgiven the way she was dumped by MI5. One day she’ll discover the truth about Brook and what was really going on.
Now, though, it’s clear that Mel’s not the only one still holding a grudge. Suddenly everybody seems to want her dead. But why?
On the run from MI5, is there anyone Mel can trust to help her uncover the past?
Excerpt
The door opens noisily, bringing with it a gust of chilly air. I turn on my stool, expecting to see Adam. I’m formulating some sort of suitably sarcastic barb. It’s not Adam, however. Instead, two men have entered. Strangers. Adam once said he found it odd that so many people he didn’t know came to The Crown but the place is his choice and I don’t come here so often that I’m going to know all the regulars. I look away from the new arrivals but immediately feel a tap on my shoulder. I’m never happy when strange men think they have the right to touch me and I tense, my hand gripping the whiskey glass slightly more tightly.
Still, it isn’t the time and place to make a scene so I relax again and look at the man who’s tapped me on the shoulder. He’s about forty, similar height to me, dark suit and tie, blond hair trimmed to within an inch of its life, and he’s holding a warrant card. I may not know all the regulars of The Crown but I thought I knew all the local coppers. There aren’t many and I’ve had dealings with most of them during the past year, one way or another. This guy is not an East Hampshire plod though. Behind him and to one side, his colleague, younger, bigger, also fair-haired, is staring at me with tight little eyes. A bully’s eyes. He looks like he’s itching for a fight. In other circumstances, I might have been happy to oblige but Kaylee had clearly been round the bar with a cloth and cleanser before opening and I wouldn’t want to bloody her handiwork. Nor would the subsequent paperwork have appealed.
Detective Sergeant Aaron Walcott, I read on the warrant card. Metropolitan Police. He’s off his patch. He says nothing so I say nothing right back at him. It’s definitely up to Walcott to start the conversational ball rolling so I pick up my glass and drain it. I don’t want to waste any bourbon if this plays out as I’m beginning to think it might.
Eventually he speaks. Maybe he was rehearsing his lines. ‘Miss Melanie Marie Milano?’ he says.
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About the Author
Steve Sheppard was born and grew up in Surrey before moving to Buckinghamshire and then to Oxfordshire, where he spent a quarter of a century living in an idiosyncratic village that was the affectionate inspiration for his fourth book, Lazytown. He now lives in Hampshire. He spent forty years starting to write books but not finishing them, until belatedly realising that the key is not to give up. The other thing he has since learned is that he should have become a celebrity before writing a book, as this would have made selling it much easier.
False Connections is Steve’s fifth book, but the first one written as a straight thriller and not primarily as a comedy, although it does contain humour. He hopes it will be the first of a series featuring feisty, funny but flawed ex-MI5 agent, Mel Milano. He also has three spy thrillers with laughs to his name, all published by Claret Press: A Very Important Teapot (2019), set in Australia, Bored to Death in the Baltics (2021), not set in Australia, and Poor Table Manners (2024), which takes place in Cape Town. These feature an initially fairly hapless hero, Dawson, and a considerably less hapless heroine, Lucy, together with varied supporting casts, most of whom are not who they claim to be. Steve’s fourth book is an out-and-out comedy-murder-mystery, Lazytown (2025).
