The Lord of Billionaires' Row

(Now also available on smashwords.com in multiple E-book formats!)

The Lord of Billionaires' Row is a novel by the blog author, which grew out of his further research into his blog article "Buy to Rot" published in February 2014. The article was on the effects and implications of very large amounts of money from overseas, not always legally come by, being "invested" in the UK property market in general and the London market in particular. Briefly, masses of houses and flats are bought and even built to lie empty, while ordinary wage-earners cannot afford to buy properties at inflated prices and they often struggle to find a place that is for rent at any price.

It became clear that, perhaps due to foreign  influence on British media proprietors, politicians and global "influence on the influencers", it was quite impossible to have a factual public discussion of those important issues, let alone other ones which the blog author discovered were interconnected. So, instead of trying to smuggle intelligent debate past The Guardian's online moderators, he wrote an exciting and enjoyable crime/espionage adventure novel in which money from communist China is laundered through the UK property market (where British organised crime was already active and constantly gaining power over law-enforcement and even politicians) and where British commercial secrets are stolen by various means, including physical burglaries by Chinese agents at key industrial sites from Scotland to East Anglia.

The novel also shows how much the policies of the Chinese Communist Party are determined by the personalities of the party's General Secretary and his rivals within the CCP leadership. When the leadership is not only corrupt but institutionally psychotic, there can be no change of direction (ie: away from disaster) without a profound reform of that institution as well as a change of leader. Just swapping leaders for another operating within the same corrupt framework will not suffice! 

The implications for Britain of the power over public life that organised crime has obtained by stashing most of its ill-gotten gains in the housing market for generations are just as chilling as the implications for China's future of unending and increasingly corrupt communist dictatorship.

Where to get the novel from:

Amazon.com

Link to Kindle/E-book and Paperback editions

Amazon.co.uk

Link to Kindle/E-book and Paperback editions

Other Amazon marketplaces:

See list of links to Amazon marketplaces on this blog article.
They all offer the Kindle E-book and with the exception of the Netherlands they offer the Paperback as well.

Author's Page on Amazon

Amazon.co.uk:

Follow this link for more stuff on the author.

Amazon.com:
Follow this link for a little bit more stuff on the author, as Amazon.com author's pages have more features!

Smashwords edition

Link to page where the book can be obtained in multiple E-book formats.

Note. This includes a mobi format version. This is formatted a bit differently from the "Kindle" Amazon mobi edition, because the formatting guidelines for the two platforms differ. Mostly, this is a matter of the platform's preferred style, which the author has respected in each case. The Smashwords edition, being available in several formats from the same source document, has in-text navigation features needed for a couple of the non-mobi formats, which are not strictly necessary on devices with Kindle-like navigation facilities and so are not present in the Amazon edition.

In-text navigation in this context amounts to a clickable "Back to Top" link at the end of each chapter or front/back matter section, which takes the reader to the table of contents, from where they can click a link to the chapter or section of their choice. In the Amazon Kindle edition, just press the menu button and go to table of contents for the same result. Hyperlinks are not implemented in the paperback edition, yet, but we may live to see (and probably, regret) this in our lifetimes.

Pricing:

The author has set the base price of the Amazon Paperback to £12.25 plus P&P. Due to the weighty nature of the book the paperback price cannot be much cheaper.  There is no VAT on books (not even E-books!) in the United Kingdom. The base price of the Amazon Kindle Edition is £1.70 There may be a tiny "delivery" charge to distort this figure.

The base price of the Smashwords edition is $2.10.

There is now an Australian-printed Amazon paperback available.