The Eros Affair
By Philip McCutchan
An anonymous call from a coin-box results in the finding of a long-buried skeleton… along with a four-letter code.
Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Shard flies to the North to investigate the finding and the code. The Security Service are more interested than normal following the tip-off and the code used.
Despite barking orders down the phone line, Hedge makes his way to the annual dinner of the Royal Agricultural Charities Institution at the Eros Hotel, where the Commissioner will be.
Home for dinner for once, Shard receives a phone call that sends his investigation into chaos. The Eros Hotel has been hijacked, with Hedge, his wife and the Commissioner inside. With gunmen holding people hostage inside the Psyche’s suite, a banqueting suite.
The hostages include a number of VIP guests, including minor government ministers and trade union leaders. But Hedge is their main concern – the shadowy screen between the Foreign Office’s Head of Security and the rest of the world, the bland, egregious thorn in Shard’s flesh who happens to be his departmental boss.
As the gunmen’s demands emerge, so does the connection with the un-earthed skeleton. Hedge being held hostage was no coincidence. He becomes the bargaining power for the hijackers…
And so shard had little choice but to make his way to East Berlin to try to extricate Her Majesty’s Security Service from a particularly tricky situation.
Philip McCutchan began writing in 1956. Prior to this, he joined the Royal Navy on the outbreak of World War Two as an Ordinary Signalman and ended the war as a lieutenant, having served in destroyers, aircraft carriers, cruisers, a battleships battlecruiser, an armed trawler, and an ocean boarding vessel. For three years after the war he sailed in Orient Liners on the Australian run and then for a time became an assistant master in a preparatory school.
Married with two children, he has been a full-time author since 1960, is a past Chairman of The Crime Writers’ Association founded by John Creasey. He is also the author of a number of sound radio scripts broadcast by the B.B.C. and overseas stations.
