Dear Debbie had only come to collect the whingeing little punks and their worthless nanny three days ago on her return from her pressing and apparently indispensable trip abroad, no doubt having enjoyed a wonderful time spending more of his money on cavorting with the latest ne’er-do-well lover boy she’d hooked up with. Not a word of thanks to her long-suffering ex-husband for taking the sticky urchins off her hands. What a lousy, miserable cow. Why, why, had he ever married her?

Abbott pushed those irritating thoughts out of his mind and turned his attention back to his work. On the bright side of things, he’d been able to spend the last three blissful days pressing on with his secret project. As his political career slowly wound down he’d increasingly spent his time researching and writing, and managed to put out a book every year or two. Those were mostly high-priced hardbacks aimed at the academic library market, which few people in the real world would actually want to read. Officially, he was meant to be working on his next magnum opus, a historical exploration of the close friendship between Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria. A sure-fire bestseller, not.

But Disraeli and old potato-face would have to wait. In actual fact, the password-protected manuscript on Abbott’s laptop screen was his work-in-progress, entitled THE PANDEMONIUM CLUB. He anticipated getting it finished soon – and what a barn burner it was going to be! The book was his passion, his baby, his main preoccupation in life. Not only that, he was aflame with the certainty that its earth-shattering impact would transform his ailing financial fortunes and set him back on the path of greatness that a man like him naturally deserved. He was hellbent on making his voice heard. Ready to name names. This book would fly off the shelves faster than anything ever published before.

Such a hot property could only be written under a pseudonym, his chosen nom de plume being ‘Thomas Revere’. He would rather have used his own name, but it was a necessary precaution. A lot of very rich, very powerful and well-known people were going to get hurt. He couldn’t wait to watch them suffer. More than anything, the book was his means of getting revenge on the once allies, now enemies who had betrayed him.