The Jagged Scar is a spin-off from Nick Rippington’s much-acclaimed Boxer Boys series.
Troubled schoolgirl Red and her best friend Marc visit London for a Valentine’s party but they get separated and she ends up in a police cell.
While behind bars the teenager befriends mysterious glamour girl Kat who negotiates her release and invites her to a 70s Soho awash with strip clubs, porn shops, shady characters and bent cops.
Unhappy with her home life back in Wales, she opts to stay and lands a job in the nightclub empire of former stripper Blaize and her porn king husband Jack.
Before long she has made friends, settled into the lifestyle and forgotten all about the problems at home.
That is until her world is turned upside down by a sequence of tragic events. It leads her to question those around her and brings her to the notice of some leading players in London’s dark underbelly who will stop at nothing to keep their unlawful activities under wraps.
And as she closes in on the truth, Red is about to make the shocking discovery that her new life is inextricably linked with the past she’s so desperate to leave behind.
Nick Rippington would like it to be known that although he once worked for the News of the World he has never hacked a mobile phone. For that matter, most of the time he can’t even remember his own passcode.
A national sports journalist with a wealth of experience, Nick took the plunge and began writing crime thrillers when Rupert Murdoch shut down Europe’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper in 2011 as a result of the phone hacking scandal.
His debut novel Crossing The Whitewash came out in 2015, receiving an honourable mention in the Writers’ Digest Self-publishing eBook awards.
That launched the Boxer Boys series, which has found a niche in the growing UK gangland market. To date, there are four books in the series – Crossing The Whitewash, Spark Out, Dying Seconds and Bare Lies.
Nick’s creation of the notorious Dolan family, their associates and enemies has been greeted with acclaim by some of the country’s most prestigious book bloggers.
Meanwhile, his standalone psychological thriller Rabette Run has been described as ‘Alice in Wonderland… with tanks and guns’ with a twist you didn’t see coming. Rabette Run (published by Red Dragon) and Crossing the Whitewash are both available as audio books while the first three novels in the Boxer Boys series are available in digital format with Amazon as a box set.
The Jagged Scar, Nick’s 6th novel, is a spin-off of the Boxer Boys which can be read as a standalone, as can all his books. It is based in 1970s Soho, London, and you may notice a few characters that appear much later in the saga.
Nick has now moved out of East London to the wilds of Suffolk with wife Liz and daughter Livvy.
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My thoughts: two teenagers run away from a small Welsh village to London in the 70s. Separated they follow their own paths – Red finds work in a Soho club as the assistant to the owner, Blaize. She’s naive and doesn’t really understand what business her new friends are in.
Things take dark turns and her naivety is soon worn away, and after a friend is killed in police custody, she vows revenge.
Meanwhile, the siblings the friends left behind in Wales start looking for them, following tiny clues to track down their beloved sister and brother.
This was a really fascinating and gripping look at the dark side of 70s London life through the lens of several young and innocent souls. There’s a lot that happens to them and some shocking, terrible things come to light. Red in particular goes through an enormous amount and Marc’s story was heartbreaking.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 
Thank you so much for supporting the tour x
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