On the Lip of a Lion

Kidnap and treachery on the streets of Auckland. Enjoying a respite between marriages TV personality Kris Nevan is reunited with his teenage daughter at the height of the Christmas season. Nevan is rich, successful and invulnerable, so he thinks. He is almost offhand in his down-playing of an ominous threat to separate him from his daughter and his money from his bank account. He is soon to become acquainted with the force of evil lurking behind the facade of a pantomime clown who, in the guise of Santa Claus, blatantly snatches the girl in an audacious act of villainy. Mortimer Kingsley, also known as Sunbeam the Clown, is the Gaffer, an ex-patriot Brit and vaudeville star, whose broken heart is held together by scars of bitterness and retribution. He and his select band of thugs have systematically plundered banks and payrolls with huge success in Auckland who remain hidden behind pseudonymous. They take Nevan's daughter and as planned they get their ten million dollars. The Gaffer is a generous, but hard master and those who make mistakes in his organisation pay the ultimate price. But mistakes have been made and a trail of devastation is uncovered to take the reader through the length and breadth of New Zealand's North Island, out onto the Waitemata Harbour where the ranks of the Gaffer's team are depleted in a serious act of housekeeping on his part. There is death on the high seas and death in the suburbs of Auckland as the Gaffer seeks to right things that have gone wrong for him. The perfect crime is suddenly not as perfect. The violence begins as the scales of poetic justice tip one way and then the other. All hell breaks erupts at the Part-Time wrecking yard as discounted underlings break ranks and express opinions. It is suggested amid the fire and the fury that follows the curtain has come down for the last time on Sunbeam, the pantomime clown; but has it? Mortimer Kingsley has cashed up and is ready to move offshore and it is never clear who it was died that Christmas morning in West Auckland. One thing is sure, it wasn't Father Christmas. Maybe it was somebody pretending to be Father Christmas, but isn't that what normally happens?