Swan Moon

By Jon Jacks

When Swan Moon’s master Monsieur Chapelet is murdered, a Japanese officer who’d promised to take her away from Saigon is arrested. Unlike Swan Moon, Chapelet’s young heir Alan initially accepts the French Sûreté’s findings; but Japan’s surrender has enabled a heavily-armed Viet Minh to wage a vicious street war. Soon both Swan Moon and Alan realise they can’t trust anyone – least of all each other

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Sep 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463696118

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Swan Moon

Jon Jacks

Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)

The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666

P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque

Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent

Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak

Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife

Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland

The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas

Memesis – April Queen, May Fool – Sick Teen – Thrice Born – Self-Assembled Girl – Love Poison No. 13

Whatever happened to Cinderella’s Slipper? – AmeriChristmas – The Vitch’s Kat in Hollywoodland

Blood of Angels, Wings of Men – Patchwork Quest – The World Turns on A Card – Palace of Lace

The Wailing Ships – The Bad Samaritan – The 13th Month – The Silvered Mare – SpinDell

Text copyright© 2018 Jon Jacks

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Chapter 1

Swan Moon watched the events taking place outside with the disinterest of sorrow.

The Japanese soldiers, in their ill-fitting uniforms, had been ordered by their smartly attired English officers to escort Captain Numata to the idling police wagon.

How would they deal with this further dishonour heaped upon them?

Should she tell the truth, she wondered?

Or was his name, like hers, already in the book of damnation?

*

Most of the French windows to the rear of the villa were still open.

Just beyond the veranda, in the glow of the large garden’s innumerable Aladdin lamps, Alan saw a Japanese officer viciously strike one of the soldiers he had lined up before him. The officer struck the soldier a second time, this time with a blow hard enough to knock the man to the ground.

The lights were once again out all over Saigon, though the glow of thankfully far off fires, and even explosions, lit up certain areas of the horizon. The investigation into Chapelet’s murder had to take place under the light of the large lamps brought in from the garden, their oily yet brilliant glow attracting its usual massed congregation of suicidal insects.

Chapelet was seated upon his favourite Louis XII chaise lounge. Facing the largely unnecessary fireplace, a characteristically superior smile was spread across his generous face, as if admiring the picture of French men o’ war bombarding Hanoi harbour. An ancient bayonet had been inserted directly into his heart, the blood running down the portentously rising mound of his belly. Where the blood reached the floor, it was soaking into the Chinese carpet, staining the leaflets scattered around Chapelet’s body.

Alan had seen the leaflets before, strewn all over the Gurkha regiment’s makeshift barracks in the old girl’s school. It was a succinct message, an ‘Appeal to the Indian Officers and Soldiers among the British troops’, claiming that both the ‘heroic sons of Gandhi’ and the Vietnamese were fighting for freedom. He had seen the bayonet before too, not long after being invited by Chapelet to stay at his villa rather than a Continental Palace Hotel overflowing with refugees from the countryside. He had taken it down from the wall to admire it; late eighteen hundreds, French, the blade nearly three-foot long and curved like an elongated Bowie knife.

It wasn’t the murder weapon, however. Like the leaflets, it had all been part of a ploy by Captain Numata to lay