The incendiary new novel by bestselling author and former BBC Producer and US Election Correspondent Bernard Clark that no publisher in the US would touch 

In America owning a gun is your right. Right? That’s what Walter Reynolds believed, up until the day that he didn’t. 

Walter was no hippie peacenik – a Special Forces veteran: Honduras, Iraq, Afghanistan, clandestine service to his country for fifty years. Walter accepted America’s understated gratitude and cheered like hell at Charlton Heston’s NRA speech – ‘from my cold dead hands.’

Then one day, at her shattered school, he felt the cold dead hands of his seven-year-old granddaughter who had never held a gun in her short, sweet life. 

It was a coincidence, and a gift to a forever grieving man, that the annual NRA conference should be held in his nearby city of Charlotte, NC. But Walter is also a dying man, with a big heart and even bigger purpose – and nothing left to lose. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BERNARD CLARK was born into a British military family, spending his formative years in a dozen different countries, before joining the BBC.  After spells as a reporter, presenter and foreign correspondent, he began making documentaries and factual series in the UK and the US, then launched a London-based independent television company in the mid-1980s, which is still thriving forty years later. 

Bernard worked for NPR and the BBC in Washington and California on the 1972 Presidential Primaries and Election, two years later covering Watergate, the beginning of a life-long fascination with America. Reporting from all over, he has visited forty-nine states, the exception being Idaho. For many years he commuted between a house in North Carolina and London, also living in Pittsburgh, New York and Washington. 

Bernard has written several books, including A Mother Like Alex, the story of a woman who adopted nine special-needs children, primarily with Down’s Syndrome, which was a best seller, and in 2025, Nagasaki, a love story about Japan in the second world war, culminating with the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city.  Bernard Clark lives near Newbury, England.