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Charlie Fox

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Zoë Sharp
(1966–)

CHARLIE FOX isn’t your average female eye. In fact, she’s not really an eye at all.

What she is is almost a female version of Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher. Like Reacher, she’s ex-military (she was kicked out of the army for reasons she’d rather not go into), she gets around (including Germany, Iraq, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, New Jersey, etc.),  and like Reacher she doesn’t seem to have to go looking very hard for trouble — it seems to find her easily enough.

She’s also — like Reacher — more than capable of taking care of herself.

As in, she kicks ass.

When we first meet her, in Killer Instinct (2001), she’s just scraping by, a former Special Services soldier teaching self-defence to “frumpy housewives” in Lancashire in her native England. But when a woman she has an argument with at a club is found dead shortly after, Charlie is drawn into the investigation. She also re-unites with Sean Meyers, a former lover and comrade-in-arms, who will figure prominently in the rest of the series. In Riot Act (2002), a housesitting job plunks Charlie right in the middler of a potential race riot. Hard Knocks (also 2002) finds her taking a bodyguard course and working undercover at a military school in Germany to uncover a murderer, while First Drop (2003), finds Charlie embarking on a new career as a “a close-protection operative,” babysitting a precocious fifteen-year old in Florida, with Sean now her boss. And lover.

And so it goes… in this long-running series, Charlie (and sometimes Sean) tangles with illegal road racers, dangerous cults, kidnappers, earthquakes, the U.S. military, assorted thugs and miscreants, and just about anything else her author can throw at her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zoë Sharp checked herself out of a private school at the age of twelve, opting for home correspondence courses, before writing her first novel (so far still unpublished) at the ripe old age of fifteen. There followed a string of jobs in her teenage years, from yacht delivery to pensions and mortgage advisor, before deciding to become a freelance photo-journalist (based on having sold one article). She lives in Cumbria, and is married, and says she would rather have a motorbike than children. She is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association.

Zoë spent most of her formative years living aboard a yacht on the edge of Morecambe Bay in northwest England. Early in her career, she became a photo-journalist specialising in cars, acquiring the research and writing skills which are the bedrock of the professional author. It also gave her an opportunity to travel in Europe, Japan, and especially the United States, which she has visited frequently over many years. She is a keen biker, car-driver and yachtswoman.

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

SHORT STORIES

COLLECTIONS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Special thanks to Martin Ross for helping me fill in the blanks.

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