SWIPE!
A Guernsey Thriller
Gerald J. Shaffer's debut thriller unfolds across the granite lanes and fog-shrouded harbours of Guernsey — an island that holds its secrets the way it holds its tides: tightly, and with considerable force.
READ ON KINDLE →"Every island has a shadow side. Guernsey has several. I know — I've been fishing off Castle Cornet since I was old enough to hold a rod."
Swipe! is the kind of thriller that could only have been written by someone who actually knows the place. Not the postcard Guernsey of cream teas and Victor Hugo's exile, but the real island — the one where the brewery smell drifts down to the harbour on a warm evening, where the old men know things they'll never tell you, and where the tides make their own rules about what stays hidden and what washes up.
Gerald J. Shaffer brings a lifetime of island knowledge to his debut — the narrow lanes of St Peter Port, the granite-walled parishes, the particular light that falls on the Russel in late afternoon. The thriller mechanics are sharp and propulsive, but it's the sense of place that elevates Swipe! into something more than genre fiction. This is Guernsey as it actually feels, not as it's usually described.
For anyone who has spent time on the island — or anyone who has ever wondered what lies beneath its composed, self-contained surface — this is essential reading.
GERALD J. SHAFFER
Gerald J. Shaffer is the founder and editor of Just Gerald Magazine — a field guide to the finer things in life, published from wherever he happens to be at the time. He has visited Guernsey since childhood, fished off Castle Cornet pier with the island's old men, watched the hill climb at Val des Terres, and absorbed the particular atmosphere of a place that exists slightly outside the normal rules of time and geography.
Swipe! is his debut novel. It is available now on Kindle.
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