After a long break due to a hectic day job, Covid-dodging and concentrating on other projects, I’ve finally managed to complete a book!
Sentinel is the sequel to Voyager, my very successful second book. It had a difficult gestation, being abandoned about a year ago after a shaky start, and it looked like it was never going to be finished. I started a new career and it seems to have (literally) taken off, so it was a surprise to me when I took up writing it again about a week into the UK lockdown in April this year.
The words seemed to fly off the page as I continued this instalment of the Voyager story (it’s planned as a trilogy) and I quickly lost myself in the ongoing tension between the characters I created in Voyager, and their adversaries in the sinister conspiracy known as the Triumvirate. I racked up to 6000 words a day in the frantic final stages of first draft – the final fullstop/period was typed early in June of 2020.
Sentinel veers away from the space-based drama and military action of Voyager and follows the espionage and security aspects of taking on a worldwide conspiracy like the Triumvirate. The focus moves away from Callie towards Voyager bit-player Matt Ramprakash, the British airline pilot turned MI5 officer who is now Callie’s husband. His efforts to expose the Tri’s MI5 insider while tracking their efforts to set up a secret meeting with the Visitors puts him on a collision course with former FBI agent Brad Barnes’s Sentinel, a private intelligence and counter-terrorism agency who are attempting to do the same thing.
Brad has an uneasy working relationship with former Tri assassin Alex, a genetically enhanced supersoldier who tried to kill him during the Voyager investigation. She is now the principal weapon against her former masters in the Tri, one of whom is her father – a fact known to Brad but not Alex herself.
Sentinel eventually recruits both Callie and Matt to their team and track the Triumvirate’s plot all the way to a remote, former Nazi base on Antarctica, where a rendezvous with the Visitors has been arranged. The final showdown will be costly for both sides.
I sincerely hope readers will enjoy this latest book, and hope it will be as successful for me as Voyager was. Time will tell!
Both Voyager and Sentinel are available from the Kindle store, on Kindle Unlimited, and in KDP paperback from your local Amazon Store.
Carl Rackman 