After two years of scamming the owners of a small French vineyard, Eric Goddard has every right to think he has chanced on a pension for life... but that was before that fateful night in November 1996 when his two best friends and accomplices were symbolically maimed by a complete stranger.
Out of desperation, he heads for London and the glitzy Mayfair dining club, home to his estranged mother and her wealthy lover, Charles de l’Eglise.
Because of Eric’s Oedipus-like jealousy and his rival’s wariness, there is no love lost between the two men, but once Charles realises that, in seeking out his mother, Eric has unwittingly made her a target, he is left with no alternative but to protect the young blackmailer if only to safeguard the love of his life.
For someone who has made his fortune on the back of insider knowledge and intuition, finding out about the vineyard recently changing hands was child’s play. Even discovering the background to the deal and the details of the new owner was hardly a test of Charles’ ingenuity. However, the same couldn’t be said about persuading a Texan billionaire of Polish ancestry to mellow his view on revenge... and as regards the man’s psychopathic son: when it came to doing his father’s dirty work, his success rate had yet to fall below 100%, and he certainly wasn’t expecting a fancy-pants restaurateur to put a dent in his record.
This is my second novel, and although I have carried over some of the characters and settings from my first book (a self-published novel entitled Bitter Taste), Sour Grapes is very much a stand-alone story.
As a footnote, it is loosely inspired by the 1995 Bordeaux wine scandal after which, Château Giscours’ director of wine was found guilty of wine tampering.
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