My name is Ken Scott. I’m forty-three years old and live in Newcastle, Northern England. My first novel JACK OF HEARTS is a story about a guy who steps over the thin line between sanity and lunacy and finds the courage and character to rob the bank he’s worked in for the last twenty-five years. My character is a Walter Mitty type loser, who one day wants to win. And he can win if he pulls off this job. I can’t say too much about the plot or the bank at present as it’s currently with a legal team. It would severely embarrass a huge UK financial organization if written incorrectly. Our hero has to overcome many complicated and violent obstacles in pursuit of his goal right up to the surprise ending. Look out for it. JACK OF HEARTS.

Bob Heggie is a banker at the end of a dead end career. He hates his job, his boss, his life. His wife has left him. He hardly knows his kids and his closest friend is a down and out newspaper seller and they’re not really that close. In the early mornings he wanders the moors of Northern England with a pair of dogs he doesn’t like, listening to Bob Dylan sing about a great bank robbery on his iPod. The Jack of Hearts in that song is the kind of man Bob imagines himself to be, but he knows he’ll always be just plain old boring Bob Heggie Then one morning he is nearly killed in an armed robbery and he starts to think. Then he devises a scheme, a grand plan, to get even with the bank and the boss he loathes.

JACK OF HEARTS Book Review

The Bank Robber is the Good Guy!

I got the galleys of this book in PDF format about a month before the book was released and this was a new experience for me. I’d never read a whole novel on my laptop before, though I do on occasion watch movies on it and the NIGHTSTALKER TV series which I download from Appl’'s iTunes store. However that doesn’t require quite the continued concentration on the screen that reading a book does. I don’t know how anybody can read those ebooks, because my eyes were a hurting, let me tell you.

Twice during the night, I had to stop, close my eyes and rest a bit, telling myself that I’d pick up tomorrow where I’d left off. But I coudln’t get the story out of my head. Part of it, I’m sure was because I was one of the first people in the world to read it and that was pretty darned exciting for me, but the other part was that I just plain wanted to see what happened to sad old Bob Heggie next. I had to know, so I toughed it out, eye strain and all.

Bob Heggie is the under manager at Martin's bank in Newcastle, England. He is under appreciated, under paid and his wife has left him for greener pastures and taken his children. He lives in a flat not far from the home where he used to live and he jogs over there every morning to walk the dogs he doesn’t like, hoping to see his kids. He wanders the moors with the dogs, dreaming of better things. He is a real Walter Mitty character and he knows it.

Then he is shot -- well kind of shot, it’s just graze -- during a bank robbery and it starts him on a path he’d never have taken otherwise. No longer does he dream of climbing mountain, he does it. He buys a Harley Davidson, learns to ride it and chases a purse snatcher down on a motercycle he commenders. He meets a girl, gets over his wife and plans a way to rob the bank he works for without getting caught.

I really liked this book and one of the reasons, besides the fact that it’s a very good and well told story, is because I’m such a huge Bob Dylan fan. I really liked the fact that Bob Heggie admired the Jack of Hearts in Bob Dylan’s song of the same name, that when he started to come out of his shell he fancied himself as that bank robber Mr. D. sings about. And I really liked the way Bob (Heggie, not Dylan) launders his money and foils those who would see him behind bars, but I’ll have to leave that for you to find out about when you read the book. After all, it wouldn’t be fair if I told the whole story here, now would it?

Reviewed by Stephanie Sane

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