{"product_id":"the-devils-feather-isbn-9780307277077","title":"The Devil's Feather","description":"A blistering new thriller about the horrors of war and the struggle to survive in the face of pure evil. Foreign correspondent Connie Burns is hunting a British mercenary that she believes is responsible for the rape and murder of five women in Sierra Leone in 2002. Two years later she finds him training Iraqi police in Baghdad. Connie is determined to expose his crimes, but then she is kidnapped and released after three days of unspeakable torture. Silently, she returns to England and attempts to isolate herself, but it soon becomes apparent that the horrors of the world and her own nightmarish past aren’t so easy to escape from.“Intriguing. . . . Insightful. . . . A worthy rival to P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.”—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e“She takes the suspense novel into new territory.”—\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Walters gracefully balances crowd-pleasing theatrics with a wickedly ambiguous ending.”—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e “Terrifying. . . . [A] scary thriller.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMinette Walters\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of 11 novels, 2 novellas, and a number of short stories. Her work, which has received several major awards, has been published in more than thirty-five countries, and has been adapted for television to critical acclaim.1I don’t know if that story was picked up in the West. I believe some  interest was shown in South Africa, but only because rape and murder had  been high on that country’s agenda for some time. I was transferred to  Asia shortly afterwards, so I never learnt the outcome of the trial. I  assumed the teenagers were convicted because justice, like everything else  in Sierra Leone, was subject   to economic restrictions. Even if the court went to the expense   of appointing a public defence lawyer, confessions of guilt, with graphic  details of how each victim was murdered, would attract a summary sentence.I know Alan Collins was troubled by the indictments, but there was little  he could do about it when his request for an experienced pathologist was  refused. He was in a difficult position—more an observer than an  adviser—with less than two weeks of his secondment left at the time of  Amie Jonah’s abduction, and the youths’ descriptions of their crimes  effectively sealed their fate. Nevertheless, Alan remained sceptical.“They were in no fit state to be questioned,” he told me. “Amie’s family  had reduced them to pulp. They’d have said anything the police wanted them  to say rather than face another   beating.”He was also troubled by the crime scenes. “I saw two of the bodies in  situ,” he said, “and neither of them looked like a gang attack. Both women  were huddled in the corners of the rooms with their heads and shoulders  sliced to ribbons and defence wounds to their arms. It looked to me as if  they were trying to protect themselves from a single individual who  attacked from the front. A gang would have been slashing at them from all  sides.”“What can you do?”“Very little. No one’s been interested since the youths confessed. I’ve  written a report, pointing up the anomalies, but there are precious few  doctors in Freetown, let alone forensic pathologists.” He smiled ruefully.  “The thinking seems to be that they deserve what they get because there’s  no doubt they were trying to abduct young Amie.”“If you’re right, won’t the killer strike again? Won’t that exonerate the  boys?”“It depends who he is. If he’s a local, then probably . . . but if he’s  one of the foreign contingent”—he shrugged—“I’m guessing he’ll export his  activities elsewhere.”It was that conversation which increased my suspicions of John Harwood.  When he was first pointed out to me in Paddy’s Bar—Freetown’s equivalent  of Stringfellows—I knew I’d seen him before. I wondered if it was in  Kinshasa in 1998 when I was covering the civil war in the Congo. I  recalled him being in uniform then—almost certainly as a mercenary because  the British army wasn’t involved in that conflict—but I didn’t think he’d  been calling himself John Harwood.By the spring of 2002 in Sierra Leone he was dressed in civvies and had a  bad reputation. I saw him in three fights while I was there, and heard  about others, but he was never on the receiving end of the damage. He had  the build of a terrier—middling height, lean muscular frame, strong neck  and limbs—and a terrier’s ferocity once he had his teeth into someone.  Most of the   ex-pats gave him a wide berth, particularly when he was drinking.At that time Freetown was full of foreigners. The UN was coordinating  efforts to put the country back on its feet, and most of the ex-pats  worked for the international press, NGOs, religious missions or world  charities. A few, like Harwood, had private contracts. He was employed as  chauffeur\/bodyguard to a Lebanese businessman, who was rumoured to have  interests in a diamond mine. Once in a while the pair of them vanished  abroad with heavily armoured cases, so the rumours were probably true.Along with everyone else, I tended to avoid him. Life was too short to get  involved with loners with chips on their shoulders. However, I did make  one overture during the six months I was there when I asked him to pass on  a request for an interview with his boss. Diamonds were a hot topic in the  aftermath of the conflict. The question of who owned them and where the  money was going had been a bone of contention in Sierra Leone for decades.  None of the wealth was fed back into the country and the people’s  resentment at their grinding, subsistence-level poverty had been the spark  which ignited the civil war.Predictably, I got nowhere near Harwood’s boss, but I had a brief exchange  with Harwood himself. None of the local women would cook or clean for him,  so most evenings he could be found eating alone at Paddy’s Bar, which was  where I approached him. I said I thought our paths had crossed before, and  he acknowledged it with a nod.“You’re bonnier than I recall, Ms. Burns,” he said in a broad Glaswegian  accent. “Last time I saw you you were a little mouse of a thing.”I was surprised he remembered my name, even more surprised by the  backhanded compliment. The one fact everyone knew about Harwood was that  he didn’t like women. It poured out of him under the influence of Star  beer, and gossip had it that he was in the tertiary stage of syphilis  after contracting it from a whore. It was a convenient explanation for his  aggressive misogyny, but I didn’t believe it myself. Penicillin was too  freely available for any Westerner to progress beyond the primary stage.I told him what I wanted and placed a list of questions on the table,  together with a covering letter explaining the nature of the piece I was  planning. “Will you pass these on to your boss and give me his answer?”  Access to anyone was difficult except through a third party. The rebel  fighters had destroyed most of the communications network and, with  everyone living in secure compounds, it was impossible to blag your way  past the guards without an appointment.Harwood prodded the papers back at me. “No to both requests.”“Why not?”“He doesn’t talk to journalists.”“Is that him speaking or you?”“No comment.”I smiled slightly. “So how do I get past you, Mr. Harwood?”“You don’t.” He crossed his arms and stared up at me through narrowed  eyes. “Don’t push your luck, Ms. Burns. You’ve had your answer.”My dismissal, too, I thought wryly. Even with a score of ex-pats within  hailing distance, I didn’t have the nerve to press him further. I’d seen  the kind of damage he could do, and I didn’t fancy being on the receiving  end.Paddy’s was the favoured watering-hole of the international community  because it remained open throughout the eleven-year conflict. It was a  large open-sided bar-cum-restaurant, with tables on a concrete veranda,  and it was a magnet for local hookers in search of dollars. They learnt  very quickly to avoid Harwood after he hurt one so badly that she was  hospitalized. He spoke pidgin English, which is the lingua franca of  Sierra Leone, and cursed the girls vilely in their own tongue if they  tried to approach him. He called them “devil’s feathers” and lashed out  with his fists if they came too close.He was rather more careful around Europeans. The charities and missions  had a high percentage of female staff, but if a white woman jogged his arm  he always let it go. Perhaps he was intimidated by them—they were a great  deal brighter than he was,   with strings of letters after their names—or perhaps he knew he wouldn’t  be able to get away with it. The less articulate black   girls were easier targets for his anger. It persuaded most of us that he  was a racist as well as a woman-hater.There was no telling how old he was. He had a shaven head, tattooed with a  winged scimitar at the base of his skull, and the sun had dried his skin  to leather. When drunk, he boasted that he’d been in the SAS unit that  stormed the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 and the scimitar was his  badge of honour. But, if true, that would have put him in his late forties  or early fifties, and his devastating punches suggested someone younger.  Despite the strong Scottish accent, he claimed to come from London,  although no one in the UK ex-pat community believed him, any more than  they believed that John Harwood was the name he had been born with.Nevertheless, if Alan Collins hadn’t made his remark about the foreign  contingent, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that there might be more to  Harwood’s violence than anyone realized. Even when it did, there was  nothing I could do about it. Alan had returned to Manchester by then and  the murders of the women had quickly faded from memory.I ran my suspicions past a few of my colleagues, but they were sceptical.  As they pointed out, the killings had stopped with the arrest of the boys,  and Harwood’s modus operandi was to use his fists, not a machete. The  tenor of their argument seemed to be that, however despicable Harwood was,  he wouldn’t have raped the women before murdering them. “He can’t even  bring himself to \u003ci\u003etouch\u003c\/i\u003e a black,” said an Australian cameraman, “so he’s  hardly likely to soil himself by dipping his wick into one.”I gave it up because the only evidence I could cite against Harwood was a  particularly brutal attack on a young prostitute in Paddy’s Bar. A good  hundred people had witnessed it, but the girl had taken money in lieu of  prosecution so there wasn’t even a report of the incident. In any case, my  stint in Sierra Leone was almost at an end and I didn’t want to start  something that might delay my departure. I persuaded myself it wasn’t my  responsibility and confined justice to the dustbin of apathy.By then I’d spent most of my life in Africa, first as a child, then  working for newspapers in Kenya and South Africa, and latterly for Reuters  as a newswire correspondent. It was a continent I knew and loved, having  grown up in Zimbabwe as the daughter of a white farmer, but by the summer  of 2002 I’d had enough. I’d covered too many forgotten conflicts and too  many stories of financial corruption. I planned to stay a couple of months  in London, where my parents had been living since 2001, before moving on  to the Reuters bureau in Singapore to write about Asian affairs.The night before I left Freetown for good, I was in the middle of packing  when Harwood came to my house. He was escorted to my door by Manu, one of  the Leonean gate-guards, who knew enough about the man’s reputation to ask  if I wanted a chaperone. I shook my head, but protected myself by talking  to Harwood on my veranda in full view of the rest of the compound.He studied my unresponsive expression. “You don’t like me much, do you,  Ms. Burns?”“I don’t like you at all, Mr. Harwood.”He looked amused. “Because I wouldn’t pass on your request for an  interview?”“No.”The one-word response seemed to throw him. “You shouldn’t believe  everything people say about me.”“I don’t have to. I’ve seen you in action.”A closed expression settled on his face. “Then you’ll know not to cross  me,” he murmured.“I wouldn’t bet on it. What do you want?”","brand":"Vintage Crime\/Black Lizard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302430462181,"sku":"NP9780307277077","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277077.jpg?v=1767739005","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-devils-feather-isbn-9780307277077","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}