Rick Brindle

  Cold Steel on the Rocks,  the first novel in the Cold Steel trilogy is free to download from Amazon for a short time. Get your free copy now!  When the pirate, Blackbeard, buried his treasure, he could never have imagined that it would fall to the heavy metal band, Cold Steel, to come looking for it. Cold Steel, high-octane British rockers who came close to legendary status, until the release of their fourth album, when their excesses send them spiralling into terminal decline. Struggling small-time band manager Johnny Faslane, in the right place at the right time, lands the dream job of managing Cold Steel, and then has the seemingly impossible mission of turning the band around. Cold Steel’s singer, Maxwell Diabolo, claims to have a treasure map that he thinks will lead him to Blackbeard’s lost riches. With the band bent on a terrifying path of self-destruction, Johnny wonders if they will even complete the tour, much less get to the Caribbean to embark on a treasure ...

I joined the RAF Regiment in 1989, and back then, the answer was a resounding yes. Bad treatment of recruits was always in the news, and there were always anecdotal stories about how back in the day, Basics was really hard, how all sorts of bad stuff happened to recruits, and how the current crop were wimps and that standards had dropped, largely because it was suddenly against the regs to beat up recruits. It’s a thing in Russia, no shocks there. I remember one of my Corporals saying that he regularly got twatted by his instructors when he went through Basics. Whether it ever happened in the British military, I have no idea, but in 1989 it most certainly didn’t. Sure, there were isolated incidents. Always have been, always will be, but they were very much unofficial, and usually (and quite rightly so), career ending for the perpetrator. Kicked out of the army for forcing recruits to strip naked and box each other. Basics was very closely monitored, and so it was always the safest plac...

  Sister Alex  gets its first Amazon rating, five stars! Berkshire, England, and it’s no longer the promised land. Ever since a species-wide illness wiped out nearly every human being, the home counties have become a gender-based battlefield. The women stick together as a single, cohesive community, but only as long as you’re a woman. And it’s the same for the men, although they haven’t quite got the same group thing going, choosing instead to range as lone threats, taking what they want. Sometimes they team up and run in pairs, but only as long as you’re a man. They’re separate tribes, and they hate each other on sight. Pick your gender, pick your side. And then there’s Alex, born as a man, identifies as a woman, and thanks to a stash of scavenged hormones, she’s stuck somewhere between the two, lost in the middle and hated by them all. But she’s survived, and if what’s left of the world won’t leave her alone, maybe she can teach what’s left of the world to accept her. Maybe....