Product Description

Rice has AIDs, got it in prison, Now he feels like he’s got nothing to live for, nothing to be afraid of. So when he’s approached by Police Officer Clay Tredway to kidnapped his wife’s niece, Rice agrees, he needs the money to end his days in style. However, at the last minute Tredway wants Rice to kidnap the son and daughter of billionaire software developer Cyril Radoslaw. Rice doesn’t want to do it, as it complicates the perfect crime he’d worked out, but then there’s that AIDs thing, so he agrees.

Race car driver Sara Hackett, Clay Tredway’s wife, comes home early from an off road race in Australia, because she’s worried about the custody battle she’s having with her niece Kelly’s wealthy grandmother. When Sara’s brother and his wife died in an auto accident, Kelly went to live with Sara and Clay, but Grandma Estelle wants Kelly with her in Hawaii.

When Sara gets home she discovers first that her husband has a pregnant girlfriend and her marriage is over, then that her niece Kelly has been kidnapped. The kidnappers want wealthy Estelle to fork over a million bucks, but Sara doesn’t think the old woman will pay. Then Sara sees on the news that someone tried to kidnapped Cyril Radoslaw’s children. The boy got away, but fourteen-year-old Paige had been taken.

Since Clay and his partner also handle security for Radoslaw, in addition to being Huntington Beach homicide cops, Sara begins to think Clay was in on the kidnapping of Radoslaw’s daughter and her niece as well.

Meanwhile Paige and seven-year-old Kelly are being held in Central California. It’s dark, they’re frightened and they see a chance to escape the two men who are holding them. They get away and flee into a dark and dangerous oil field. In short order their captors realize they are gone and give chase.

Back in Huntington Beach someone has burned Sara’s house to the ground, with Paige’s father dead in Sara’s bed. Now the cops, with her husband leading the charge, are after Sara for murder. She figures out where the kidnappers are holding the children, and with only an elderly woman and her dog for help, Sara heads up to the oil fields of Central California, just a step ahead of the law. Can she get to the girls in time? Can she save them?

And back in the oil field Paige and Kelly are in full flight. They hide first here, then there, as their pursuers get ever closer. The kidnappers no longer care about keeping the girls alive, they want them dead, and the frightened children know it. Paige could escape, but not with Kelly, the child is too young and too slow, so Paige has to tough it out, playing cat and mouse with her deadly trackers until she figures a way out of her dilemma.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36198 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 340 pages

From the Publisher
Fourteen-year-old Paige Radoslaw is watching her brother surf from the Huntington Beach Pier as a big man named Gundry is watching her along with a wispy weasel of a man named Rice. Paige’s father is software billionaire Cyril Radoslaw and the watchers are out on this sunny-bright day to kidnap his children.

Finished surfing, twelve-year-old Peter joins his sister on the pier. Rice lures them down the beach, says he wants to see some of the paintings the surfers have decorated the beach wall with. Gundry shows up with a van. There’s a struggle, Peter gets away, but Paige is captured. She’s taken to a ramshackle shack in the middle of an oil field in central California along with another kidnap victim, seven-year-old Kelly Hackett. Paige engineers an escape and she and Kelly take off at a full run into the middle of a dark oil field and minutes later the kidnappers are hot on their trail.

DESPERATION MOON is the debut novel for writing sailor Ken Douglas. It’s a fast paced thriller that drips tension from every page as you race along with worry about the two girls, kidnapped by a depraved psycho and his slow witted, malichious partner. Douglas writes suspense like no other and somehow he manages to put his helpless characters into the most desperate of situations. You know the kind, just when things can’t get any worse, they do. Then they get still worse.

From the Inside Flap
Worry about the approaching custody battle for her niece Kelly with Estelle, her dead brother’s rich mother-in-law, causes off road race car driver Sara Hackett to lose control of her car halfway through the Australian Desert Safari, a race between Sydney and Darwin. Out of the race, she decides to go back to Long Beach, California a week early.

When she arrives home she finds her niece has been kidnapped. The kidnappers want a million dollars from Estelle who Sara believes won’t pay. Sara sees on the news that software magnate Cyril Radoslaw’s daughter Paige has also been kidnapped. She knows that Clay, her police officer husband, has been advising Radoslaw on security and figures out that he is behind both kidnappings.

The next day Radoslaw is found dead in Sara’s bed. Now the police are after her and the message to Sara is clear. Radoslaw wouldn’t pay either. Sara is desperate. She has to elude her husband, the police and find the girls before the deadline runs out.

About the Author
My name is Ken Douglas and I’m an underpaid writer, so underpaid that I have to do my own bio here. I write thrillers and suspense stories. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years, ever since my wife Vesta and I sold everything we had and bought a boat. We didn’t really understand the sailing part, had never done it before, but heck we’d raced cars across the Australian desert going real fast, so how hard could boating be, after all they only go between four and ten miles per hour, slower sometimes.

We bought a big old raceboat, sixty feet and named it "Great White Wonder," after that first Bob Dylan bootleg. The boat was run down and ready for scrap, but we put two years of hard labor into it in Trinidad and made it new again. Then we hired someone to teach us how to sail it and we spent the next eight years cruising up and down the Caribbean island chain till the money ran out.

Below please see a brief description of my books, then I’ll write a little more about me.

DESPERATION MOON: Sara Hackett must save two little girls from dangerous kidnappers, but she doesn’t have the money to pay the ransom.

DEAD RINGER: Maggie steps into her dead twin’s life to get out of a bad marriage only to find that her twin had been murdered and now the killer is after her.

RUNNING SCARED: Joey Sapphire wakes next to a dead man and now the killer is after her. She is in trouble and she has nowhere to run.

TANGERING DREAM, written with Jack Stewart: Incest, death, tragedy, betrayal and teenage homosexual love, I don’t know how, but somehow it all works out in this different kind of thriller.

DIAMOND SKY, written with Jack Stewart: Beth Shannon’s husband stole conflict diamonds from the Russian Mafia before he died. Now they're after Beth, because they think she knows where they are. And she does, only she doesn’t know it.

There you have it, can’t get much shorter than that.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we sold the boat because the money ran out? Take a chance on one of my books, I think you’ll get caught up by the stories and you’ll be helping Vesta and me in our quest to save up enough money so that we can buy another boat, smaller this time, and go cruising again.

The sea, sometimes it’s cold out there, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes hard, sometimes it’s terrifying, but it’s never boring.

Best regards,

Ken Douglas

Customer Reviews

Women in Trouble, Despicable Bad Guys, Super Thriller
Racecar Driver Sara Hackett and her navigator sister are halfway through a grueling off road race across the Australian desert when they wreck their car. Out of the race, Sara decides to go home to Huntington Beach, California, where she is raising her niece Kelly along with her police officer husband, Clay Tredway. However when she gets there she finds a pregnant woman staying in her house. It seems Clay has been a bad boy.

Actually he's been worse than bad, he's hired a couple thugs to kidnap Kelly and another little girl named Paige, who is the daughter of a wealthy software developer. Before Sara can adjust to the shock of Clay's infidelity, she's confronted with the news of the kidnapping. Clay had been counting on Kelly's wealthy paternal aunt to pay a million dollar ransom before Sara got back from Australia, then apparently the software guy refuses to pay. Someone kills him, dumps the body on SaraÕs bed, then torches her house.

Now Sara has the cops, led by her two-timing, back-stabbing hubby, hot on her tale as she races to find the kidnappers and save Kelly and Paige.

Meanwhile the kidnappers hired by Clay have taken the children up to a central California oilfield where one of them works as a security guard. However the girls escape into the oilfield, chased incessantly by the kidnappers as the girls hide here, catch their breath, then run there, in a couple of the most suspense filled chapters I have ever read.

In fact suspense runs all the way through "Desperation Moon", a thriller extrodinaire if ever I've read one.

Mucho Desperation in this Finely Tuned Thriller
In DESPERATION MOON Ken Douglas provides his readers with one of the most despicable bad guys I've come across in a long time. I'm talking about Rice, the aids infected kidnapper of two young girls, who somehow doesn't think he's a pervert, when he so obviously is. Rice is hired by Huntington Beach police officer Clay Tredway to kidnap his wife Sara Hackett's niece along with the daughter of a wealthy software developer.

Sara is a racecar driver and when she comes home early from a race in Australia, she finds a pregnant woman in her house. Apparently hubby Clay is a philanderer as well as a kidnapper. Soon after she finds out about the kidnapping, she figures out what a weasel her husband really is. She sets out to rescue the two girls. But Clay doesn't make it easy for her. He frames her for the murder of the software guy and now she is on the run even as she's running to save the girls.

Meanwhile, Rice, and his not-to-bright accomplice Gundry, have problems of their own as the girls have escaped into an oil field in the heart of California, where the kidnappers had been holding them hostage. Now they don't care about the ransom anymore, they just want the girls dead. Can Sara, and the quirky band of characters she's enlisted to help her, get to them before the killer/kidnappers do?

In a frantic race against time which involves stealing a small plane in the middle of the night, a midnight swim and more tension than you can shake a stick at, Sara finally confronts her bad cop, no good, two timing, kidnapping rat of a husband. And if you're a girl who has ever been two-timed the way Sara has been, you are absolutely going to love the ending of this book as it plays out to the tune of Bob Dylan singing "Tangled up in Blue." This is a thriller.

Action-Packed, Fast-Paced Thriller
Two young girls are kidnapped. One of them is race car driver Sara Hackett's niece seven-year-old Kelly, the other fifteen-year-old Paige, the daughter of a wealthy software developer.

The kidnappers - Rice, an emaciated man just out of prison and dying with aids and Guthrie, a big, dumb character who works as a security guard in an oilfield who believes violence is the first comeback in an argument - argue about whether or not they should keep the girls alive, and this gives Paige and Kelly the courage to escape.

But when they get away, they find themselves in the middle of a working oilfield out in the middle of nowhere and it's the middle of the night. Very spooky, very scary. They're not gone long before Rice and Guthrie discover their escape. The frightened girls go deeper and deeper into the oilfield, with the kidnappers ever on their heels.

Meanwhile Sara has been framed for murder, is on the run, running from the cops, running toward that oilfield to rescue the girls and running out of time. She has been betrayed by the system and betrayed by her husband, but she's not about to brood over it, because those girls are in desperate need of her help.

This is a fast-past book with excellent and very believable characters. I liked it very much. I think you will too.