And, action!
Plenty of it and super nasty bad guys and stories so outrageously crazy they can only be true. We’ve got a McGuffin plotlines, real buried treasure, assassins, WWII war criminals, dodgy coincidences, plot twisting surprises, Apocalypse Now, the fall of Saigon, a Buddha, the Cannes film festival and locations galore: Switzerland, France, the Philippines, Northern Ireland, and California. There’s film people and nice people – actually, scratch the last one, there are no nice people. With all that in mind – that’s only half the picture.
I just had a lot of fun letting this book carry me away. The story is complex with plots inside the surface plot but it’s well done and easy to follow. Tongue in cheek but not farce. There’s parody and pastiche and boundless energy but also the exploitation of a clever idea.
Fall Out is intentionally filmic, Grenside was a movie man. It’s about a script that could be a gold mine and a deadly secret connected to an unfinished film project that wrecked a number of careers. This novel has that insider humour that lampoons the pompous over blown perspectives of Hollywood. While still feeling the love we all share for the film capital of the world. From the opening where Sam Wood, writer, takes a bullet in an unnecessarily complicated assassination The fun doesn’t stop. The hit is made to look like a robbery/stabbing which it just as easily could have been in the first place – but hell! That’s not Hollywood: think big, outlandish, strange.
It all begins in the Philippines, November, 1944. Finally the ‘work’ is complete, Major Ito Okobudo of the Imperial Japanese Army addresses the assembled allied prisoner slave labour congratulating them on their work and his officers on Japanese ingenuity. Ceremony over the orders are clear, no witnesses, General Yamashita has arrived to see to that personally, bad news for Okobudo too. Even when he is executed for war crimes Yamashita takes the secret to his grave.
Venice Beach, LA, 2020. Sam Wood types ‘The End’, and it’s done, the script for Fall Out is finished. A story of ‘greed, a secret fortune, a broken friendship, betrayal and murder.’ The script is sent to a select audience, people who’ve been harbouring a secret for more than twenty years:
‘Who would realise that FALL OUT was a road map to their past.’
Sam thinks back to the first script he wrote for Hollywood and how years later that led to him working with Marcus Riley again on The Last Company in the Philippines, a doomed project. He wondered what the reaction will be to Fall Out. That’s when the buzzer goes and…
When Marcus Riley gets the script he thinks it’s solid gold, his career is down the toilet, this is the lifeline, he has to have it.
Fall Out is about the founding and fall of two criminal empires, about a heist at the US embassy on the fall of Saigon in 1975, but it really about…
Well that’s for you to find out. This novel was originally published a few years ago, it’s leaner and meaner. It’s been republished by Sharpe Books, revised and re-edited by the author. Two more books in the series this spawned have also been released Bastion and Sunset Circus.
Paul Burke is the editor of Aspects of Crime and the author of Spies on Screen, releasing on 20th October 2026.