Jack Lee Bronson parted company with HM Royal Marines six years ago. Then a Captain, now a free agent, he travels where he likes, when he likes. He saw a lot of good people getting a raw deal when he was growing up. It imbued him with a passion to help them fight back. He's a man of the people, not the elites.
He specialized in military intelligence after commando training. This harrowing account finds him crossing Dartmoor, a desolate tract deep in South West England. A man in camouflage fires a stinger across the road just ahead. Bronson's tyres are blown and his car somersaults down onto jagged rock. Seconds later an IED detonates. Someone's intent on taking him out.
Two military police show up. They accuse him of planting the IED. He's thrown into a brutal prison. Framed on a trumped up charge. He wakes to a woman screaming. Three crazed inmates have seized a female officer. They strip, whip and gang rape her, leaving her for dead.
Meanwhile, a spiralling bank card scam has the local police on their knees. The fraudsters are making fools of them. When the prison governor finds out who Bronson is, he pleads with him to help - only to find the scam emanates from deep within his own jail.
Dr Simon Solomon is a gifted Cambridge geoscientist working for the British Geological Survey. He too has been framed and thrown into a stinking cell. It happened when he was panning a local river for English gold.
The prison cares little for political correctness. The focus is on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Some of the worst is dished out by a team of alluring female officers. They oversee chain gangs of misogynistic male prisoners. The men struggle through brutal fourteen hour days, breaking rock under the searing whips wielded by the women.
The female officers have fun with men outside work, too. They cleverly manipulate online dating sites to trap love cheats. They ensnare an alpha male by the name of Mark. The things they put him through are not for the timid.
The governor releases Dr Solomon, and he teams up with Bronson and the impressive Detective Inspector Lauren Golding. The trio walk a knife edge between life and death as they struggle to break the scam. They uncover more than they could ever have imagined: an innovative, ruthlessly effective way of relieving ATM's of their contents.
The women drive Mark to the brink. They break him and are shocked to find he's not just a love cheat. He's an integral part of the scam. They use savage techniques to extract all the detail he has.
Bronson draws heavily on his military training to access the prison. He follows a disused mining adit in from the open moorland. He takes out some prisoners using Shotokan Karate, and reaches the heart of the prison.
He discovers one of the deputy governors murdered his own father years before. He's out for revenge and justice, big time.
But he's also in for one hell of a shock. The sort that can stay with a man for the rest of his days...
