 | When you're trying to increase your name-recognition as the author of a specific form of action thriller it helps if you can get another big-name to endorse your style. Brisbane author JJ Cooper has done just that in securing a front-cover comment from Lee Child, author of the best-selling Jack Reacher novels. Cooper's hero, Jay Ryan [interesting initails there] has now appeared in the author's second book, Deadly Trust, which has just been published. He was interviewed for "The Courier-Mail" by Bruce McMahon. |
Cooper was already a huge fan of Child and his former military policeman, Jack Reacher, who wanders the US as a lone ranger, resolving many-faceted dramas with guile and fists.
"I wanted to write something similar to the Reacher series and that's what I set out to do - that quick writing, precise and that doesn't have to be proper English per se," explains Cooper, 39.
"I'm not a literary fiction writer and I don't ever intend to be. I'm a commercial writer, looking for something for readers to enjoy. I write for entertainment."
Cooper's hero is Jay Ryan, now a former army interrogator looking to enjoy the quiet life between Byron Bay and Brisbane in Cooper's second book. But someone's out to kill him and there's an anthrax attack on the Gold Coast. What follows is Ryan's one-man battle against enemies within and without.
Deadly Trust is a fine, fast-paced thriller that manages to use a southeast Queensland landscape without parochial cringe and successfully introduces an action man with flaws, unlike some previous efforts from ex-British soldiers-come-authors. And like the aforementioned Reacher, Ryan travels pretty light with just the credit card in his boot.
