Hit Back Harder

Book 2: The DI Stella Cole Thrillers

by Andy Maslen

Genres: Police Procedurals; Vigilante Thrillers

Synopsis

This cop has blood on her hands.

Detective Inspector Stella Cole only has one case.

To find, and kill, the remaining members of a legal conspiracy who turned her world into ashes. But their leader, Adam Collier is her boss.

And he’s pulling in friends from the underworld to take the fight to Stella. Chief among them, an Albanian drug lord nicknamed, The Shark".


Regrouping in Spain, Stella makes contact with an old adversary. A retired gangster named Ronnie “The Razor” Wilks. He proposes a deal that tests Stella’s resolve to the limit.


The only problem? Stella is losing her mind to a second, unrelentingly brutal version of herself she’s dubbed “Other Stella”. As the violence escalates, the question is, which one will win?


A visceral, psychological crime thriller…


Hit Back Harder picks up where the first book in the series, Hit and Run, left off. Stella has already shot and killed a High Court judge. But will she have the skills and the survival instincts to fight off the ruthless killers on her tail?


Expect a rising body count and corrupt deals between people who are morally compromised.


…for readers who like the dark side



GRAB YOUR COPY OF HIT BACK HARDER

Release date: December 11, 2017

Publisher: Tyton Press

Print pages: 420

Sample

Chapter 1

 

PORTSMOUTH, 24 April 2010

 

DIESEL FUMES, FRYING meat and salty air: the three dominant smells as Stella Cole made her way up clanging steel steps, along a blue carpeted corridor, up some more stairs, then out onto the deck where crying gulls wheeled overhead, occasionally swooping down in an attempt to snatch an ice cream from a toddler’s hand, or a sandwich from an adult’s.

 

Her scruffy, silver, Japanese hatchback, which she’d bought for three hundred pounds in cash at a secondhand dealer on the outskirts of Portsmouth after handing in the rented Golf, was sixty feet beneath her on the car deck. Its boot dirty, but roomy – contained a holdall with the clothes she’d taken up to Scotland on her mission to execute her family’s killer. It also held a rifle, a Blaser .308 with a sound moderator and telescopic sight; a Winchester semi-automatic shotgun; a Glock 17 pistol; and a substantial quantity of ammunition for all three weapons.

 

All three guns had been acquired illegally. She had stolen the Glock, and its 9mm hollow-point ammunition, from the armoury at Paddington Green, as her boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier, had rightly suspected. The long guns she had bought in a shop in Pitlochry, using a genuine Metropolitan Police-issued firearms certificate. It was genuine in the sense that it was printed on a genuine blank on a genuine Met computer. But it was issued in the name of Jennifer Amy Stadden, a girl who had died in 1980, three months after her second birthday, as were the passport and driving licence in Stella’s messenger bag.

 

She found a spot on the rail where she could look back towards the port. Hers was not the casual gaze of a tourist, searching for family or friends who’d come to wave them off. She was watching. Observing. Checking that she hadn’t been followed. On the drive down from Scotland, she’d chosen the anonymity of A roads for as much of the journey as she could manage. But she’d had a ball of tension in her stomach for the entire journey, as she wondered whether the dead judge’s friends would have sent someone after her. But no. The waving crowds filming the boat on their phones seemed innocent enough.

 

“Why? What were you expecting? A bloke with a sniper rifle dressed in tactical gear?” a mocking voice whispered in her right ear. She didn’t turn towards the speaker, knowing the voice belonged to the split-off half of her own personality she’d christened Other Stella. She didn’t know which was more frightening: the thought of more of the Pro Patria Mori vigilantes coming for her, as they’d come for her husband, or the fact that at times of stress she seemed to be increasingly under the influence of this malign alter ego.

 

As the crew made ready to leave Portsmouth harbour, Stella reflected on the circumstances that had brought her to this precise moment, this exact spot. The murders of her husband and baby daughter. The move to northwest London she’d managed, despite her drinking and pill-popping, in an effort to rebuild her life. Her pursuit and eventual killing of Leonard Ramage.

Now she was running. She doubted they’d involve the police. Hah! The police who weren’t actually in on the whole corrupt business. Too much at stake. So it would be her against them in a dirty fight where the victor would be the one willing and able to keep raising the stakes until nobody else was left standing.

 

But she wasn’t running blindly.

 

She wasn’t running away.

 

Stella was running towards.