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Jack Leavers is a former Royal Marine with over thirty-years’ experience working in the military, private security, corporate investigations, maritime counter-piracy, and risk management. His varied career has included numerous deployments to conflict zones around the world such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, trouble spots in Africa, and the Somali pirate-infested waters of the Indian Ocean.
He continues to work in challenging environments and has now begun to pen novels inspired by some of the more enterprising projects that got the green light, and other audacious plans that didn’t.
Author's note:
Appetite for Risk is a fictional story set in the aftermath of the Iraq War. For inspiration, I drew on my own experiences during the same period and in many of the same locations that feature in the book. Unfortunately for the protagonist John Pierce, he must deal with numerous situations and decisions I faced, plus I've thrown him plenty of curve balls and weaved in fictional plot lines to seriously test his mettle. No changes were needed for the Amman-Baghdad road trips though. After taking the (now) unfathomable decisions to make those journeys, they were always bound to produce plenty of drama.
John Pierce isn't me; he's maybe a fifteen-years younger, abstract version of me. But undoubtedly cooler, funnier, and fitter than I choose to remember through my rose-tinted Wiley X sunglasses.
And if my wife is reading, that roving eye is all John's.
Yours aye, Jack
Reviewed by Rabia Tanveer for Readers' Favorite
Appetite for Risk by Jack Leavers is a story written on a very touchy topic, but the author does it justice. It is a fast-paced novel that takes the reader on a roller coaster ride that they don’t want to get off. Simply put, this is a novel that runs heavy on great plot, smooth action, and suspense that keeps the interest of readers and builds it. I became invested in the characters, even though I didn’t particularly like quite a few of them. John Pierce is a hard character to like, but this is something that makes him such a good protagonist. I enjoyed hating and loving him!
This is the story of a man named John Pierce, a man whose business is not doing so well and he is barely making ends meet to support his family. His contacts and friends living in Iraq tell him that the time is ripe for him to set up in Iraq and make money quickly. Relocating was easier for him than he anticipated, but things went crazy when the battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq reached its peak. He finds himself in the center of it all and there is nothing he can do to get out of it. Can he remain untouched and keep his family safe in this war? Does he even have a chance?
I never felt that the novel was rushed, not even once. The story was given proper time to develop and grow so that the flow continued unscathed. John was one hard character; he was good and bad, but that just made him even more attractive to me. It made him more human and that made it easier for me to understand him. This is a really good, well-developed and well-constructed novel!
