Nirvana Bites
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This is how Nirvana Bites was summed up in the official Orion press release for the trade paperback version published in June 2003.
Jen is trying to get a job at the BBC but her chances are thwarted by her prospective employer, Stanley Highshore. In a delicate emotional state after being blackmailed, he’s up a ladder in his BBC office clad in very little and with his numerous piercings on show. Jen recognises him as Stapled Stan – a regular on the south London S&M scene. Terrified that his seedy secrets will be disclosed, and his life as the respectable husband of a Conservative MP is in jeopardy Jen is enlisted to find and confront his blackmailers.[…click to read more…]
Trading Tatiana
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This is how Trading Tatiana was summed up in the official Orion press release for the trade paperback version published in January 2005. From the author of NIRVANA BITES comes a sparkling, fast-paced and blackly comic second novel, TRADING TATIANA. It tells the story of an unlikely good Samaritan, and a runaway teenage prostitute and the events that unfold when their lives collide.
Jo Cooper leads an uneventful life, selling jewellery on a Greenwich market stall, babysitting her neighbours’ kids, and trying not to pay too much attention to the noises made by the S&M devotees who live next door. Home for Jo is a top floor flat in the Old Kent Road council block, Boddington Heights. An ex-drug-addict herself, she has a penchant for rescuing people: waifs and strays, a Ukrainian refugee whose cause she champions and the man in buttock-less leather trousers she finds chained to the roof of her building.[…click to read more…]
De Nada Nirvana
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Most people would be overjoyed at the offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to the Costa del Sol. But Jo isn’t so sure. All she has to do is find Matt – the teenage nephew of her mate’s bloke. It all sounds so easy … So why does she feel so uneasy?
Arriving in Benalmadena, Jo’s investigations soon result in an introduction to the side of the region the authorities don’t want the tourists to see; the reason the area is known as the Costa del Crime. Hopelessly out of her depth, Jo is floundering until she meets Tina, the Top Totty from Totnes. Tina is an ex-beauty queen who is desperate to contact her son, who is in Morocco having been snatched by her husband. Together, Jo and Tina get onto Matt’s trail. But it soon becomes clear the teenager had been following a sinister agenda all his own.[…click to read more…]
Me, John and a Bomb
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What makes someone want to build, set and detonate a bomb? In the case of anarcha-punk, Suky Higham, aka Sky High, it’s a combination of rage, frustration and confused politics. It’s hard to do on your own though. So when Sky saves a suicidal teenager, John Griffiths, she sets about inducting him into her lifestyle of petty crime and sabotage.
Sparks of a different kind fly when Sky and John meet the members of the Nirvana Housing Co-op. It appears the south London network has been infiltrated and no one knows who to trust any more.[…click to read more…]
The Gene Pool
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In the fifth novel in the Nirvana series, Jen and Jo battle against local government corruption. In the process, they discover that blood relations can be as important as their alternative Nirvana family.[…click to read more…]