More Short Fuses (Four Short Stories) by Stephen Leather (MOBI)

Description

Four short stories from bestselling author Stephen Leather, plus opening chapters of five of his bestselling thrillers.

The short stories are: Rules of Engagement (where Spider Shepherd has to help a friend who is in serious trouble with the police), The Constituency Meeting (where a group of old folks decide to commit a murder), Ghost Kids (where a holidaymaker takes more home from Thailand than he expected) and Massage Therapy (where the massage skills of a Thai masseuse change a man’s life forever).

There are also tasters of five of his bestselling novels, including Hard Landing, The Stretch and The Tunnel Rats.

Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an eBook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful eBook authors and his eBooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. In 2011 alone he sold more than 500,000 eBooks and was voted by The Bookseller magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world. Born in Manchester, he began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television shows such as London’s Burning, The Knock and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV. You can find out more from his website www.stephenleather.com and you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenleather

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Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Stephen Leather is one of the more prolific Amazon authors and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to categorize. His work spans a number of genres, including action thrillers, horror, paranormal, and erotica. In order to give readers a better feel for his writing style and range, he has compiled four short stories from different genres in this free collection, “More Short Fuses” (a similar, earlier collection, simply entitled “Short Fuses,” is also available on Amazon). Although the quality of the individual stories varies somewhat, and some of them may not be to everyone’s tastes, “More Short Fuses” should contain something that most readers will enjoy.The first, and longest, story in the book is “Rules of Engagement,” featuring Leather’s action series hero Spider Shepherd. I’m not that familiar with all the British police and military ranks, but Shepherd is an highly trained undercover secret agent with a military background. Ironically, this story has little to do with his training and a lot to do with his former acquaintances in the Service. One of them, Jock McIntyre, hasn’t adjusted too well to civilian life and shot at a police car before barricading himself in his apartment. He’s intent on committing suicide by cop and Shepherd and another former colleague try to talk him out of it.There’s no real action in “Rules of Engagement” but a lot of drama, of the type with which U.S. readers familiar with PTSD stories will be quite familiar. Shepherd sees that his former comrade poses no real danger to anyone but himself but has to try to figure out a way to extricate McIntyre from a situation in which his only alternatives seem to be death or a long prison sentence. The story is quite effective emotionally and a distinct change of pace from the typical shoot-em-up action thrillers common to this genre.The second, and best, story in “More Short Fuses” is “The Constituency Meeting.” A politician running for re-election makes a campaign stop at a senior citizen home. He thinks it’s going to be a quick stump speech and round of handshakes, but he soon discovers that these senior citizens have a lot more on their minds. Fans of Alfred Hitchcock will love this story, and, even though the it’s pretty easy to figure out the ending, Leather’s surprisingly light style (for a serious subject matter) makes it more entertaining, especially as it gradually dawns on the main characters just what is going on.The last two stories in the book both are set in Thailand (a country with which Leather is apparently quite familiar), both feature the sex industry (although neither is especially graphic), and both are marred by disappointing endings. In “The Ghost Kids,” the narrator, a businessman on vacation in Thailand whose main interest is sampling the available adult pleasures, picks up a local bar girl. He soon learns that she has a couple of companions (the title of the story provides a big hint about them), and the narrator winds up with more than he bargained for. In “Massage Therapy,” a friend of the unnamed narrator is diagnosed with terminal cancer and decides to spend his remaining days in Thailand, but a trip to a local massage parlor has a surprising effect. Both stories are well written and give a good feel for the local atmosphere (and not the usual tourist destinations I might add). Unfortunately, Leather seems to have run out of interest in them about a page before the endings, and readers will likely ask “Is that all there is?” when they finish. I think Leather intended them as “slice of life” anecdotes, but they definitely could have used a bit more work to reach a definitive end.All in all, there is one excellent story in the collection (“Constituency”), one very good one (“Engagement”) and two very good beginnings with disappointing endings. These four stories take up slightly more than half of the book. The remainder consists of excerpts from several of Leather’s novels. Since “More Short Fuses” is free, the filler material is somewhat irrelevant to the main review. Readers may or may not enjoy single-chapter excerpts from various novels. Certainly, as a free book, whether anyone cares for the filler or not, “More Short Fuses,” is well worth the time to read it. It’s also well organized, with links at the end of each story to other similar Leather books that are available for purchase. Obviously, “More Short Fuses” is a marketing tool for Leather and his publishers, but what they are providing aren’t just teasers but some quality entertaining stories. I recommend “More Short Fuses” for what it is, four stories from a very talented author that provide a good example of his skill.

⭐ Like its predecessor ( Short Fuses (Four free short stories) ) of a couple years back, MORE SHORT FUSES is essentially a convenient and relatively easy vehicle for author Stephen Leather to promote his massive body of fiction produced over the past couple of decades. The man is a writing machine.The first half of this e-book is comprised of four short stories that will give the reader an excellent introduction to Stephen’s writing style and the flavor of his fiction. The second half is simply the first chapter of five previously-published novels to get you hooked into acquiring and reading the whole of each. OK, so this is blatantly self-serving but, I ask you, what’s a poor, starving thriller writer supposed to do short of going door-to-door like a high school kid hawking magazine subscriptions?The first short, “Rules of Engagement”, features the author’s ongoing, serialized super-hero, Dan “Spider Shepherd, the ex-SAS trooper now working for MI-5. The last two, “Ghost Kids” and “Massage Therapy”, reflect the author’s immersion into the country of his expat residency ‒ Thailand. The second, “The Constituency Meeting”, is reminiscent of his early novels of the 90s (before creating the Shepherd character), each of which was a one-off tale and some might say is perhaps the best stuff Leather ever wrote simply because the plots were so imaginative and so varied. (The first I ever read, The Chinaman , was the one that got me hooked.)If, like me, you’ve read almost all of Stephen’s full-length novels, then MORE SHORT FUSES can simply be deleted from your e-reader after finishing the four shorts, all of which are diverting entertainment. And, they’re free!

⭐ More Short Fuses by Stephen Leather is a short story collection and an introduction to a few of his books. It’s a great way to get a feel for his writing if you are thinking about trying some of his stuff.

⭐ I greatly enjoyed these four very well-written short stories. Mysteries and suspense type readings are usually notamong my usual types of reading for pleasure, but these were fantastic! I just enjoyed the endings which were sodifferent than I expected at the start of each.

⭐ Not bad. Kept me entertained for the most part.

⭐ Stephen Leather is a very good writer and Short Fuses is another very good reason to read his work. I liked it very much, especially as there are not too many authors writing short stories. Sometimes a short story is just what you want, without getting into a huge novel. Stephen Leather should be read!

⭐ Stephen Leather is a really great writer, I enjoy his stories, they keep my attention

⭐ Leather is a great short story writer. Every British politician, everyone who profits from the aged and the pensioners, should read ” The Constituency Meeting” Stephen Leather brings his characters to life, one sees them every day…. He also kills some….

⭐ Not for me.Thanks, Amazon, for having free and low cost books,so that we can read or not, depending on our tastes.That makes it ok to take a chance on books I otherwisecould not.

⭐ Good read. I liked it

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