SWAP is my new novel. Set in the future it follows the story of Eric Kingston, a junior journalist working for the Barrymore Gazette. Life for Eric is pretty uneventful, it’s a sleepy job in a sleepier town and he feels that his dreams of discovering one great story are unlikely to ever come to fruition.
However, great advances have taken place in the medical profession over the past 20 years and doctors have discovered a way to allow patients to ‘swap’ with volunteers who can take on their illness for an hour or so to give them some respite care, and allow them to do things they would never be able to otherwise do.
Eric knows about the swap process only too well as his sister, Kate has been diagnosed with a life-threatening condition and now he only gets to see her when she comes out of hospital once a month because of Swap.
It is only when Eric chases up a seemingly unimportant story about a local man nearly drowning that his suspicions about Swap are aroused. At first the seeming ramblings of a madman, Eric is told that the process is actually a huge and terrible cover up for a dark government secret. He thinks little of it until the man suddenly turns up dead, and then Eric can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching him.
He starts to dig deeper and starts to realise there is much more to the Swap process then he ever thought possible. The closer he gets to the truth the more danger Eric finds himself in. Will he be-able to tell the world before it’s too late?
Imae courtesy of Jimmy Brown @flickr.com