And a third novel for the month.....

WAR & PIECES

Jacob Sinclair barely achieved midlist fame as ‘a poor man’s Clancy’ in the 1980s with thriller novels about the CIA assassin Jeremy Burke. The collapse of communism took all his plots with it and his series died the kind of death that sees them mostly lingering unbought at used book stores. A bitter ex- author now teaching English at college and inadvertently destroying the authorial ambitions of his students, he finds his daughter doing National Novel Writing Month and declares the quest to write a 50,000 word ‘novel’ in one month to be an insult to real authors and an affront to Literature itself.

Jacob’s desperate quest to get his novels back in print culminates with a trip to San Francisco that will see him attempt to murder the entire nanowrimo board of directors – who might turn out to be ninjas – in a desperate attempt to defend the art of the written word against the modern insults intent on destroying it.

He may, or may not, be having a mental breakdown.