Product Description

Joey Sapphire wakes with a splitting headache and she is cold. The overhead hatch is open and the boat is rocking more than it should. Then it hits her. Her boat doesn’t have an overhead hatch and the reason the boat’s rocking is because it’s at anchor, not in a slip. She tries to remember who she’d left the party with. She couldn’t have had so much to drink that she’d go to someone else’s boat. She didn’t do that kind of stuff. She didn’t.

A fly lands on her stomach, she slaps it, feels something sticky, blood. And she’s nude. She doesn’t sleep that way, never has. She feels someone next to her, his skin is cold. She screams because he’s dead. After she gets a hold of herself she realizes that she’s in big trouble.

Joey is in Trinidad. She and her husband Mick are sailing around the world. She is minding the boat while Mick is visiting his parents in Texas and supposedly taking care of business. It doesn’t take her long to realize that she must have been drugged and it also doesn’t take her long to figure out that she has to do something about the body, because they hang murderers in Trinidad. She drags the body topside, weighs it down and rolls it overboard. Then she washes the blood off, finds her clothes, dresses and wipes down the boat, trying to erase any fingerprints she may have left around.

Finished, she eases herself into the dark water and swims to shore. On dry land, she starts the half mile trek toward the marina where her boat "Satisfaction" is safely anchored. She thinks she’s going to be all right. Nobody will ever find the body, therefore nobody will ever connect her to the crime. Then she’s shaken with an icy shock because the killer knows and he knows about her.

Nina Brava is a young, beautiful and pregnant Brazilian girl who is pinning away in Fortaleza, "Satisfaction’s" last port of call. She’d been careless, fallen in love with Mick Sapphire, didn’t use protection and now she’s faced with raising a baby alone. She’s mulling over her problem when she sees Mick swimming in the hotel pool. He’d come back. She tells him about the baby. He’s overjoyed and they get married in a quick ceremony.

Later, as Nina is about to enjoy her first night of wedded bliss, a giant red bearded man breaks into their hotel room and attacks Mick and Mick flees with red beard in pursuit, leaving Nina and that’s the last she sees of him. She goes through his things, finds a camera case stuffed with cash, but not much else. She knows where Mick’s boat is, so she packs her bags.

In Trinidad Joey is anxious. She can’t get a hold of Mick and someone has broken into her boat. She’s afraid it might have been the killer. Then, when she thinks things can’t get any worse, pregnant Nina shows up. Joey is furious, but she can’t blame the girl for her bigamist husband. Now both women have a score to settle with Mick and Joey believes he might be in Tobago, staying with a movie starlet he knows, so they book a flight, but agents working for the American First Lady have planted something that looks like drugs in Joey’s bag and she’s arrested on arrival, leaving Nina to fend for herself.

Alone in a strange country, Nina goes to the police station to see if she can bail out Joey, however the cops have no record of Joey’s arrest. Nina leaves dejected, is attacked on the street and wakes in the hospital, but sadly she loses her baby. With no one to help her, the only thing she can think of doing is to go back to Trinidad to Joey’s boat and wait for Mick to show up.

Meanwhile Joey escapes from the cops, manages to get to Trinidad by the hair of her chinny, chin chin and together Nina and Joey go to America with passports supplied by a Brazilian drug lord to elicit the help of Mick’s father, a world famous defense lawyer. Along the way they learn about Mick’s plan to blackmail the President of the United States and they decide to spoil it, but what they don’t know is that Mick would just as soon kill them as bat an eye and by the time they find out it may be too late.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #598959 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Released on: 2005-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 340 pages

From the Publisher
Suave and sophisticated Mick Sapphire is a lowlife bigamist and he’s blackmailing the President of the United States, but the president doesn’t know it. Mick’s demands got as far as the first lady and she called on veteran CIA agent Paul Snelling to handle it for her, telling him she wants it kept of the books. Her husband is not to know.

Sapphire has gone to ground somewhere, so Snelling is in Trinidad, watching his wife Joey, who lives on a sailboat in the Marina there. Also he’s hired contract agent Clay Clayton to track down Sapphire. Clayton finds Sapphire in Brazil where he’s just married a local girl. He tries to apprehend him, but Sapphire gets away and Clayton flies to Trinidad to report his failure to Snelling just in time to see the new wife show up and confront the old one.

Snelling expects the women to fight, however instead they team up and decided to run Mick down and they believe he is staying in Tobago. Snelling plants sugar in Joey’s bag and has her arrested on arrival. He thinks by threatening her with years in a third world prison that she’ll talk and tell him where Mick is. However, Joey escapes, gets back to Trinidad after a harrowing sailboat ride, where she meets back up with Nina and they go to the States to confront Mike’s parents with Snelling and Clayton on their heels.

Snelling doesn’t believe the girls are in on the blackmail attempt and regrets what he’d tried to do to Joey and this bothers Clayton. He took the job with Snelling for the money, but he doesn’t know what it’s all about. However he suspects there is a whole lot more money involved than what he’s being paid and since Snelling isn’t talking, he decides to take matters into his own hands.

When the girls find a flashcard in Mick’s camera bag with compromising photos of the president’s daughter, they figure out Mick’s game and they decide to spoil it. Clayton will stop at nothing to get in on the action, but tough as he is, he’s child’s play compared to Mick, an ex-Navy seal and bomb expert.

This is the third book that Ken Douglas has done for Bootleg Press and like the first two, it’s a thriller guaranteed to keep you up throughout the night. If you give it a try we believe you’ll be back for more.

Sincerely,

Bootleg Press

From the Inside Flap
Joey Sapphire wakes next to a dead man, the son of the American Ambassador to Trinidad, in a boat at anchor. It quickly dawns on her that she has to get rid of the body, because it looks like she did it and they hang murderers in Trinidad. So she weighs it down and drops it overboard. But she knows she’s not safe, because the killer knows about her.

She finds out her husband Mick is blackmailing the daughter of the President of the United States and that the dead ambassador’s son was Mick’s partner. Now some very bad men think she is in on the plot.

Joey is in trouble and she has nowhere to run.

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.

TANGERINE 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

Far-Fetched, Furious, Fast & Fun
Joey Sapphire is sailing around the world with her husband Mick. Currently they are in Trinidad and their boat "Satisfaction" is in a marina. Mick is supposed to be home visiting his parents over the Christmas holidays. Joey has stayed with the boat. She wakes up one morning in bed with a man on a boat that is not her own. She has no memory of how she got there. The man is dead. After a few harrowing moments she comes to the realization that she has to get rid of the body, because if she goes to the authorities they might think she killed him and they hang murderers in Trinidad.

Nina Brava has just turned twenty-one. She and her partner and best friend Joana run an internet café in Fortaleza, Brazil. She and Joana started life out as teenage prostitutes, but have managed to get out of the business and they have a bright future ahead of them. When Mike and Joey stopped by on their way to Trinidad, they stayed awhile and Mick, who is just about the biggest rat that ever graced the pages of a book, had an affair with Nina. He told her his marriage was over and Nina thought it was love. When Mick and Joey left she was devastated. Now Mick is back. He tells her he's divorced and he and Nina marry.

Only Mick lied. He is really on the lam because he got some dirty pictures of the daughter of the President of the United States and tried to blackmail her, only she went to her mother, the first lady, who doesn't take anything from anybody. She sets a couple professional ex-CIA killer assassin types on Mick's trail. When one of the killers catches up to him in Brazil, he flees, leaving Nina behind to deal with the assassin. Nina gets away and goes to Trinidad, looking for her new hubby, only to find out he is still married to Joey.

So now you have the rat's two young wives fleeing for their lives from the first lady's hired killers. And to make matters worse, Mick has decided that he has to kill the president's daughter. Joey and Nina have to somehow get over their differences and stop him. Then cannot go to the police, because the killer's have framed them for drug smuggling. So there you have it, the beginning of a non-stop, far-fetched, furious, fast-paced and fun book. I just simply loved it. I marveled at how the girls snuck into America and how they dealt with all the obstacles thrown in front of them. This is a very exciting book and I highly recommend it.

Two Women in Trouble and Running Scared
Former Olympic swimmer and around the world sailor Joey Saphaire wakes on a sailboat in Trinidad, where she doesn't belong, next to a man who isn't her husband. It's dark out, she can't remember how she got there or who the man is. He's cold. Cold and dead. She realizes she'd been drugged and chains the body to an anchor and dumps it overboard, as they hang murders in Trinidad.

Unknown to Joey, she's being watched by ex-CIA man Paul Snelling, because her husband Mick, who is away, has taken some not so nice photos of the president's daughter and is blackmailing him. Mick has figured out that some pretty tough guys are hot on his tail, so he goes into hiding in Brazil, where he and Joey had been before sailing on up to Trinidad. There he marries Nina, a young woman he'd been having an affair with, but when the baddies show up, he splits, leaving Nina to deal with them alone. Nina flies to Trinidad to find her new husband and finds his old wife instead, the one he's still married to. So now the two Mrs. Saphires have a problem. With Mick gone, they are lined up in Snelling's crosshairs and he sets about making their lives miserable.

The women have to get out of the country and they are on the run, but while they're running they learn what Mick has been up to and they believe he's going to kill the president's daughter. So now they have to elude Snelling and his evil henchman, the secret service and Mick as they race the clock to try and save the girl's life.

RUNNING SCARED had my pulse running like it was out of control. There is just no let up in the frantic pace, no place where you can put the book down and take a breather. This is the kind of story you want to read when you start a vacation, because it'll take your mind right off your work, your worries and everything else. What a book.

Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

My Fingers Burned Through the Pages!
I'd read "Desperation Moon" by Ken Douglas awhile back and I liked it very much, so I bought "Running Scared" and I have to tell you I was up all night with a tub of Starbucks Coffee Almond Fudge, gorging myself as my fingers burned through the pages of this delicious thriller. It's a good thing I had that ice cream to cool them down.

South African Olympic swimming medalist Joey Sapphire is sailing around the world with her new husband, Mick. He is a snake in the grass if ever there was one. She is a little naive. They are stopped for awhile in Trinidad and Mick is supposed to be in America, visiting his parents over Christmas and Joey is alone, taking care of the boat. She goes to a Christmas party, has a little too much to drink and wakes on a strange boat next to a dead man, who just happens to be the son of the American Ambassador.

Joey is in trouble deep. She's afraid to call the cops, because they hang people for murder in Trinidad. So she weighs the body down and deep sixes it. However, she soon realizes she's not as safe as she'd thought, because there is a killer on the lose who probably knows or can figure out what she has done.

To make matters worse, a couple days later a young Brazilian hottie named Nina shows up, claiming to be Mrs. Mick Sapphire, a title Joey thought she had the exclusive rites to. But before she can confront Mick about this other wife, she's arrested on trumped up drug charges and her only friend appears to be that other woman her husband married, who also happens to be pregnant.

And that's just the beginning of this thriller that has two women running from the Caribbean to California with a deadly stop off in Arizona that will absolutely get your pulse racing like it's never raced before. If you're in the mood for a thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat, then this book is for you.