Page Updated: 13/05/99
John Harman
John Harman
Called To AccountCalled To Account
Dangerous AssetsDangerous Assets
Money for NothingMoney for Nothing
The Bottom LineThe Bottom Line
About the Author (Photo by Abigail Harman)
Bibliography


Paperback - Headline
Called To Account
After a failed marriage, Eleanor Lambert has abandoned London and her high-powered career, to start again with a small accountancy firm in the quiet seaside town of Poole. She cannot know that the neighbouring coastline has become central to a death-dealing industry of staggering profits and ruthlessness. It has also become the focus of intense police surveillance.
When a young colleague dies in a car crash, Eleanor takes over his task of completing the audit of Drumanon Consolidated, a successful conglomerate engaged in the import of foreign goods. Working through the group's accounts, she comes across a number of curious anomalies... and also becomes aware that she is being closely observed. Several days later the mystery watcher is found drowned in Poole harbour.
When Eleanor receives an unexpected and disturbing visit from the police, she learns that the man was an undercover cop... and that something very big and very dangerous is happening around her. It now seems that nobody she deals with can be totally trusted.
Behind this shadowy menace looms the terrifying psychotic violence of London's organised criminals and their vicious enforcers. And as these move in to protect their interests, Eleanor's innocent investigations have become a threat that stands in their way...
'The stuff of bestsellers' Cambridge Evening News
'John Harman writes with pace and power and could give his namesake Grisham a run for his money' …Northern Echo
'Harman's villains are memorable and brilliant... A rapid page-turner' …Yorkshire Post
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Paperback - Headline
Dangerous Assets
In the financial jungle she is the hunter. But what she's hunting could destroy her.
When it comes to hunting money; no one does it better than Melissa Semmington. A forensic accountant with a firm of Liquidators, her nose for deception and her uncanny ability to follow a paper-trail through the most complex financial labyrinths have made her a legend among her colleagues.
So when the corrupt Exchange Bank of International Industry and Trade is forcibly shut down, leaving a host of unanswered questions and billions of pounds of investors' deposits missing, it's no surprise that Melissa gets the job of tracking down the bank's assets.
At first she is reluctant to leave her Down's syndrome son Jamie at home But as the trail leads her from Luxembourg to New York and west coast of America, the thrill of the chase and the mental challenge of outwitting the shadowy figures behind the Exchange Bank soon have Melissa's adrenaline flowing. And there are compensations, as a chance meeting with the handsome and charming Bob Briscoe on if to the Cayman Islands brings a much-needed touch of romance back into her life.
But as she closes in on her goal she uncovers evidence of the Exchange Bank's real purpose a conspiracy so terrifying that its perpetrators will do anything to prevent its exposure. And Melissa suddenly has a new puzzle to solve; how to save her own and Jamie's life

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Paperback - Headline
Money for Nothing
'Hitting an old lady over the head with a brick and stealing her handbag is a crime. Anything else is just business.'
Armed with precise knowledge of the ways of international business, five men, all establishment figures and at the top of their professions, set out to make themselves a fortune - illegally. Within a year, they are multi-millionaires. They also cause a revolution in one of Her Majesty's protectorates, the brutal slaying of a platoon of British soldiers, the bankruptcy of a major company and the imprisonment of an innocent man. They are also accessories to murder...
No one ever connects them to these events and no one misses the money. It is the perfect crime. No one ever knows. Until more than twenty years later, a beautiful girl tells Jerry Pilgrim the whole incredible story as they lie together one morning in a big bed in a small cottage in a pretty Northamptonshire village. For Jerry, the knowledge of a secret that could destroy some of the country's most powerful men is just too tempting, so he sets out to commit his own audacious crime.
But someone else, it seems, knows the secret too. For wherever Jerry goes, death goes before. You see, everybody wants . . . money for nothing. John Harman's absorbing thriller about a gigantic and ingenious fraud is peopled with men and women whose love of money drives them on to outrageous crimes. From the discreet Swiss bankers to the ruthless Mafia bosses, from the bloody guerrillas to the high-ranking men of the English professional classes, greed is the theme and blood is the price.
'Cleverly conceived and constructed' …The Sunday Times
'Expertly woven web of fraud, suspicion and crime'…Oxford Mail
'Absorbing... slices deep into the fraud and outrageous crime that motivates even the most seemingly stable pillars of society' …Yorkshire Post
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Paperback - Headline
The Bottom Line
In the barracuda-world of big business, Richard Hoecheck has fought his way to the top, to the point where he is offered one of the biggest jobs in Europe: as boss of Manney-Rowpit. It is a job he wants so badly he can taste it; and when he has sole control of the great company it's a job he will do anything to keep. Blackmail, bribery, deceit, even the deadliest sin of all - Hoecheck will stop at nothing to achieve the power he needs to transform his corporation into one of the largest and most powerful organisations in the world.
Madeleine Weybourne, too, has one overriding ambition: to be a winner in the whirling circus of high finance. But when she is fired from her Wall Street job for refusing to have sex with her boss, and then finds herself blacked by other firms, she joins Manney-Rowpit. Now Madeleine has another ambition: to revenge herself on the man who betrayed her.
When Tony Oldbridge arrives home to find that his wife has left him, he decides on a new start. Joining Manney-Rowpit he soon finds himself caught up in the slippery business of Public Relations, where nothing is as it seems; where politicians are bribed and compromised, the press manipulated and death on a massive and tragic scale covered up. But it is only when he discovers the cloaking of deadly global pollution; when he realises that 'the only big thing about this business is the size of the lies', that he and Weybourne join forces to expose the power-crazy Hoecheck and the monolithic monster he has created.
It is a dangerous game where there are no rules. In the high-spending, jet-setting, teeming stream of executive life, where living fast and playing dirty are the norms, everything - sex, friendship, honour, even life - has a price at which it can be traded.
Hoecheck, Weybourne and Oldbridge all find themselves driven to the edge to achieve their private ambitions. For each of them nothing else matters but... The Bottom Line.
'A powerful new story of industrial espionage and murder... packed with colourful characters' …Peterborough Evening News
'Lots of sex and boardroom skulduggery' …Manchester Evening News
'This well-written novel offers an exciting and suspenseful plot. Recommended' …Library Journal
'A spicy tale' …The Sunday Times
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About The Author
John Harman was born in Harrow, North London, and has worked in newspapers, publishing and the conference industry in most parts of Britain and America. In the early '80s he formed his own film production company which he sold a few years later in order to write full time. He now lives in a pretty village close to Cambridge with his wife Abigail, a professional photographer. They have five children.
John Harman is a well-known thriller writer or, as he is termed in America, mystery writer. he is based in Cambridge, England. Harman has written four crime novels, or mystery novels, all of which are published by headline book publishing, London, England. all his crime thrillers have received terrific revues by the press. Harman is also a film scriptwriter and television scriptwriter. a number of his film scripts and television scripts have been produced and broadcast.

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Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

  • Called To Account
  • Dangerous Assets (Headline)
  • Money for Nothing
  • The Bottom Line

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