Ian's Game

By Hilbert Haar

Crime writer Ian Green is tired of being poor and devises a plan to become wealthy. He marries the rich and lonely widow Ashley and takes her on a honeymoon to the island of Aruba. On Arashi Beach where Joran van der Sloot once murdered Natalee Holloway, Ian commits the perfect murder. Five years later he receives a disturbing letter than will change his life forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilbert Haar
• Release date: Dec 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215274347

Hilbert Haar

Hilbert Haar (1950) started working as a journalist in the Netherlands in 1969. He has worked for newspaper and magazine publishers and also worked as an independent writer with his own company V.o.f. De Stijl. He spent seven years in Greece on the island of Crete, and lived also briefly in Utah and California. He worked as the Editor-in-Chief at Today, a muckraking English-language newspaper published in Philipsburg, St. Maarten - Dutch West Indies, for ten-plus years, until the paper closed down after Hurricane Irma in 2017. He is currently traveling with his wife Myriam in Asia.He finished his first full-length thriller - The Ultimate God Conspiracy in 2018, and published a second thriller - Diary of a Psychopath (Dutch title: Dagboek van een Psychopaat) in 2021.Het luchthartige zelf-help boek Achttien Tips Voor een Gelukkig Leven verscheen eveneens in 2021.

Book preview

Ian’s Game

Hilbert Haar

Published by Hilbert Haar at Smashwords

Copyright 2023 Hilbert Haar

* * *

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

Bad idea

Rent Arrears

The Perfect Murder

Flashback

The Typewriter

Till Death Do Us Part

Bright Idea

The Dead Cowboys

Aruba Ariba

A Very Cold Case

Five Years Later

Game Over

One Way Ticket

About the author

From the same author

Contact

Preview: Mind Reader

Bad Idea

Ian Green was far from brilliant until he got a brilliant idea. At least, he thought he did.

Ian grew up in the slums of Los Angeles, the product of an alcoholic mother and a good for nothing father. Poverty was their middle name.

His mother financed her love for the bottle by entertaining men when her husband was not there. His father’s idea of exercise was beating up his little son as often as possible.

Ian knew already at a young age that this was not the life he wanted. He did not want to be poor. He did not want to get a beating practically every day. No, young Ian decided, I want to be wealthy and I want to become famous.

When his sixteenth birthday arrived, he decided this was as good a moment as any to take control of his life. Bad idea. He left his parental home even though he had no clue about what he should do to keep his head above the murky waters of Los Angeles. With nowhere to go, he started out living his life on the streets where he soon discovered that the only commodity with value was sex.

The blowjobs he performed disgusted him, but they paid the rent. Ian thought about his miserable life, thinking that the hand the universe had dealt him was rather unfair. He found refuge in the city’s public library, located near the Hilton Checkers Hotel. This is where he discovered his love for books and that would play a pivotal role in the direction his life was about to take.

For reasons even unknown to him, Ian fell in love with Irish writers, like Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, C.S. Lewis and Jonathan Swift. It occurred to young Ian that writing could not be all that difficult. If Oscar Wilde could do it, why wouldn’t he be able to do the same?

Using the library’s computer system, he began to write his own stories. Given the near-criminal background of his parents it came as no surprise that Ian opted to write crime stories with a Stephen King-twist.

His first story had a simple title that left nothing to the imagination: The Gruesome Murder of Aunt Mary. For lack of a better idea, he sent his story to the crime magazine Blood. Three weeks after he mailed the story he received a reaction: Blood was going to publish the story and pay Ian a paltry sum for it. The magazine’s editor also encouraged Ian to write more stories for them.

And so it began.

Ian discovered that he could write his stories as fast as Blood could publish them. He never took more than a month to complete one. He said farewell to his life on the streets and rented a small apartment on Skid Row, one of the most dangerous areas in LA. It wasn’t much, but it was a roof over his head and a place where he could hone his writing skills.

Ian was well aware of the downside of living where he lived. Downtown LA was twelve times as dangerous as the national average and the crime rate was more than 500 percent higher than the national average. The annual murder rate in the area approached a record high of nearly 500. Ian considered himself lucky that, so far, the criminals had not targeted him.

As the years went by and Ian became a regular contributor to Blood he realized one thing: if he continued doing what he was doing he was going to be poor for the rest of his miserable life. And if he continued to live on Skid Row, one day his luck would run out and he would end up with a knife in his back or a bullet in his head.

And that, Ian told himself,