STEVE HARDING

A London crime novel

BADBLOOD

Graves don’t stay shut.
Neither does the past.

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Complete manuscript · Seeking representation

01 — EXPLORE THE LIBRARY ↓THE NOVELS OF STEVE HARDING

The manuscripts

The library.

A story behind every spine.
Select a book to open it.

Bad Blood

Behind the books

Steve Harding

A little about me. I’ve been writing for twenty-five years, longer if you count the notebooks I never finished. It happened around a job, a family, a fair amount of travelling. A page or two in a hotel room. A chapter in whatever flat or house I was living in that year.

Some of these manuscripts go back to the early 2000s. A few are newer. I’ve spent the last couple of years bringing the lot of them up to scratch, and no, I don’t claim to know it all. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I’m reminded of that most mornings. But I turn up for it, every day, the way you’d turn up for a job you actually wanted.

More about Steve

None of this happened alone.

A retired Metropolitan Police murder detective went through my crime novels and told me, without much ceremony, where I’d got the procedure wrong. Between him, a handful of beta readers I trust, and a few others, every book left the process stronger than I could have made it on my own.

Thank you for stopping by. I hope you find something here worth staying for.

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Synopses, manuscript extracts & development notes.

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Women’s fictionCollateralSteve Harding

Women’s fiction · Finance thriller

The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Margin Call.

Collateral

Working title

They took everything. She’s calling in the debt.

Current status · Seeking representation

Synopsis

A 3 a.m. knock on the door. That’s how Samantha Harrington, twenty-five, newly engaged, mid-way through a psychology graduate degree, finds out her parents are dead. Before she’s even had time to grieve properly, she finds her father’s final notebook and, buried in it, a dangerously leveraged trading position he never got around to unwinding at his firm, Harrington & Cole.

His old partner, Victor Lang, moves fast, seizing the position “for the estate’s protection.” Within days Samantha learns the family home has been quietly pledged against a debt she never signed for and never agreed to. She doesn’t wait around for the firm to finish picking her family apart.

Using her father’s unfinished risk model and a mind built for exactly this kind of problem, Samantha seduces her way into a foothold at Sterling-Whitman, a rival firm, under the reluctant sponsorship of a trader named Julian. What starts as an unpaid, narrow seat becomes something far more deliberate: one track converting her father’s insights into real trading leverage, the other a careful, deepening relationship with Alexandra Voss, a guarded woman carrying her own buried grief, one that mirrors Samantha’s in ways neither of them expected.

As her influence grows and the grip Victor Lang put on her family’s estate starts to loosen from the other end, Samantha must navigate a minefield of loyalties and dangerous information while she becomes someone entirely different from who she was three months ago. Grieving daughter. Then something colder, sharper, willing to use every tool she’s got, financial, emotional, strategic, sexual, to take back what was hers and make the people responsible pay.

Samantha Harrington was a grieving twenty-five-year-old with a thesis to finish. Now she’s the one in the room studying everybody else, and Victor Lang still thinks the debt is his to collect. He’ll learn that the most dangerous position on any trading floor isn’t the leveraged one. It’s the one held by someone with nothing left to lose. The deeper she goes, the harder it is to tell which of the people she’s using she has started to need.

The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Margin Call. A grief-stricken woman reinvents herself with cold precision to infiltrate the world that destroyed her family and turns Wall Street’s own leverage back on the men who used it against her.

A brief synopsis, intended to give the flavour of the book. Not a full or final summary, and subject to revision.