Thriller / suspense
August 2012
Wotcha’ a contraction of the 15th century English greeting ‘what chere be with you?’ Watcher n a person who watches or observes somebody or something. A voyeur. Say WOTCHA! to Bart Raines, who’s condemned forever to be a watcher after a childhood prank left his eyelid glued to his beloved telescope. Stuck with one eye that can’t not see, he’s turned voyeurism into a lucrative blackmail industry. Say WOTCHA! to former rock star, avid coke fiend, Richard ‘Winston’ Smith who’s watched by millions among them erstwhile school friend Bart, who’s orchestrating revenge for Winston’s teenage betrayal through the sinister global surveillance network he calls the Daisy Chain. Say WOTCHA! to high class whore Daisy Chains (neé Raines) and her teenage son Joe, who’s abducted along with his girlfriend by a sinister ‘Christian’ cult, which leaves the kids to die, hogtied and helpless in a derelict drainage tunnel slowly filling with sewage. Watched by the world’s media, Winston, Daisy and Bart reunite to use fame and the Daisy Chain to save two teenage lives and their own souls from the filth that’s about to drown them. Wotcha! is a comic spit in the eye of born again zealots with a wink and a twinkle to the rest of us but it’s also deadly serious. Mining a rich seam of coalblack humour and sex, drugs and rock and roll, it starts on a bittersweet nostalgia trip and builds up to the pace of a thriller. CONTROVERSIAL STUFF? Its themes and explicit language make this a candidate for one of those ‘parental advisory’ stickers they put on CDs these days. Does that make WOTCHA! a book that people aged under sixteen shouldn’t read? In the author’s opinion absolutely not. ‘If rude words and references to sex, drugs and rock and roll upset you per se, this book’s not for you. But if you believe, as I do, that a sense of humour is what separates “naughty” from “evil”, I think you might enjoy this story, laugh at the funny bits, think about the serious bits and read the redemption between the lines.’
