This begins an action adventure series which you really should be with at the start. It’s brilliant for Gerald Seymour and Frederick Forsyth fans, with a load of fascinating detail about airports, the military and hi-jacking, characters you really feel for and a high-voltage plot.  But be warned, if you are flying you may wish to avoid it – it contains a planeload of people, dead pilots and an impenetrable cockpit in the midst of a clever post 9/11 thriller.  A highly accomplished debut, a great holiday read.

Synopsis

Since 9/11, the door between the pilots and the passengers on an airliner must be locked and impossible to break down. But what if the pilots are dead? Tristie Merritt leads a renegade band of ex-soldiers. Their daring scam will take millions from a furious British government and give it to veterans' charities -- if MI5 don't catch up with them first. But faced with the ultimate terrorist outrage at 36,000 feet, MI5 and the CIA find that Merritt is their one hope of preventing global disaster.

Reviews

'A great read ... gritty and authentic'
Andy McNab

'A terrific debut. Charters is definitely one to watch.'
Harlan Coben

'BOLT ACTION is a stunningly assured debut, utterly credible in every detail and filled with fascinating characters. It builds to a nail-biting, gut-wrenching climax aboard a transatlantic jetliner that will have readers turning pages in thrilling desperation to find out how this brilliantly complex plot finally resolves itself. And in Capt. Tristesse Merritt, a beautiful, complicated, utterly feminine fighting soldier, Charlie Charters has created the most intriguing female character in contemporary thrillers since Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.'
Tom Cain

'Take a pinch of Gerald Seymour's terse characterisation, add a sprinkle of Frederick Forsyth's peerless research, flavour with the jaunty cynicism of Robert Harris, and place in a pressure cooker for a few hours. Voila! BOLT ACTION, so hot it fairly sizzles off the page. Charters'
debut novel has the sure touch of a seasoned author. The subtle ways in which he interweaves his storylines, and the confidence with which he carries off his terrifying hijack scenario, ensure you

'll want to devour this in one sitting. And to those of you who pick this up in an airport, remember that it's only fiction ... so far.'
Boris Starling

'BOLT ACTION has all the ingredients of a terrific thriller: it's exciting, well-plotted and packed with interesting factual information about airport security, hijacks, the military, and so forth. But what makes it really stand out is the sympathy Charlie Charters feels for his characters. They're not the one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs you'd associate with this sort of fast-paced genre fiction. Rather, they're flesh and blood human beings with real frailties and because Charters cares about them you will too. A really first-rate debut.'
Toby Young

'A seriously entertaining read from an author who delivers action and suspense in equal measure.'
Mike Atherton

About the Author

Born in London and raised in Fiji, Charlie Charters spent his working life based in Hong Kong and now lives near Malton, North Yorkshire, which rightly considers itself the horse-racing capital of the known world. One of his first memories is of traveling with his mother, an award-winning filmmaker, as she tried to piece together the rackety strands of Somerset Maugham's life-changing travels through the Pacific. This was eye-opening stuff for a seven-year-old: spying, brothels, homosexuality, suicide, casual affairs, and that was just the Good Guys. Those trips, and being caned on his 13th birthday by a headmaster whose own father it turned out had similarly thrashed the schoolboy Roald Dahl somehow gave him an early desire to become a writer. However he did very little about this until turning forty, by which time he had worked, variously, as a racing tipster, war reporter, radio DJ, award-winning TV producer and presenter. He was the youngest ever senior vice president of the legendary sports marketing company ISL, whose collapse in 2001 was the second biggest corporate failure in Switzerland's history and nearly bankrupted FIFA. Clearly, that couldn't have been his fault. In 2004, he helped launch the British Lions-styled Pacific Islanders rugby team, featuring the best players from Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. He is married with four children and a Labrador that likes to watch the news. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation