A RETIRED electronics engineer from Evesham has seen his second novel released just in time for the Christmas holidays.
Ian Coates, who has waited 10 years for his crime thriller to be published, is delighted to see the fruits of his labour.
“It is a fantastic feeling to finally see Backlash published after all the waiting. It was a great sense of achievement to see the final result of the 90,000 words I had slaved over for so long,” he said.
The tale follows a young interior designer Trish McGowan who is coerced into distributing blackmail demands, and is published today (December 17) by Wallace Publishing.
The cover of Backlash by Ian Coates. s
One victim retaliates and Trish has to run for her life. But staying alive means finding the one person who can help – her blackmailer – but how does she find someone who doesn’t want to be found?
“The idea for Backlash came while walking along the Grand Union Canal,” he told the Observer. “I saw a woman smoking in the stern of a canal boat while sitting on a bottle of flammable gas. My first thought was that if the gas canister the smoker was sitting on leaked, she and her boat would disappear in an explosion.
“I then wondered, but what if the canister was inside while she was outside and it exploded, you would then be able to say that her habit of smoking actually saved her life.
“That led to the opening line of the thriller ‘It was Trish McGowan’s addiction to a daily half-packet of Lambert & Butlers that saved her life…’ A lot of the ideas then developed from that first sentence.
“I carried on wondering why would the gas canister explode inside? Was it deliberate? And if it was deliberate, why should someone try to kill her? From there, the rest of the story slowly unfolded in my mind over the following weeks.”
There have been setbacks for Ian along the creative pathway as two job redundancies and a couple of house moves hindered the writing process and then publication was significantly delayed by Covid.
Although the whole process has been somewhat frustrating, he has managed to remain single-minded and to keep going despite events frequently blocking progress.
One high spot, though, was when Backlash was runner-up in an international writing competition in 2023.
Ian, who had a busy career in electronics design engineering uses his expert knowledge in his novels.
He is already a third of the way through writing his third book which he hopes will get sent for publication at the end of 2025.
Backlash is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
See iancoatesthrillers.co.uk for more information.
