In Sparta

Mark Wagstaff

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Why I wrote this book

Most days I caught the Piccadilly Line but that morning I took the Victoria Line. I took the Victoria Line because I had to go to the sorting office to collect a package containing yet another rejected manuscript. The Victoria Line station was closer to the sorting office, that was all. It was about half past nine when we started to hear what had happened that morning. I remember that at the time I felt anger - this was my city, my piece of the world - with a background sense of wonder at stories unfolding all around me.

I spent the afternoon walking around Bloomsbury and Kings Cross, intrigued at the silence of the crowds, all walking because there was no other way to get around. It’s the silence I remember most now.

 

Trying to get home through police lines, it occurred to me how helpless the officers all seemed. Londoners are used to the cocksure Met, their super-charged cars and lethal kit. But in the eyes of the young men who could do nothing but tell me to get back behind the tape I saw anxiety, fear for a situation they didn’t know how to respond to.       

It wasn’t until I got home, much later that night, I realised the significance of that publisher’s rejection.

Synopsis

In London, any time soon, a bomb maker goes to work, with a fierce, Spartan creed to deliver destruction. Someone buried so deep in everyday life, no one can guess their moves.

For a man adrift in a job he can't do, with a boss out to get him, the bombs are more than distraction. They are the path to a new life. As order collapses, and the state, paralysed, looks dangerously weak, Robert Millman clings to the only strength he knows: his obsession with Terri, a bright young woman who seems to offer a way back to his young days, when he still had chances. But as Millman gets sucked deeper and deeper in to a radical underworld, he is forced to confront a violence that leaves nothing untouched, a violence from within.

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