Hilary Clinton shocked and shaken.

My second book, The Twain Maxim, is now at the editor, who will chainsaw through my beloved text and bludgeon my wonderful story into shape.

Fortunately I’m very happy for this process to be brutal. It is a kind of bracing S&M textual intercourse.

I have set the book in probably the worst place on earth: Kivu in the Congo.

I picked the place for the mining fraud that is central to the plot as this place transcends the merely awful. The more I dug into the place, the more terrible the facts.

Hilary Clinton just visited and the reports are she was shaken. Enough said.

The centre of civilisation there is Goma, a city half buried in Lava on the edge of a lake filled with enough carbon monoxide that if it is released by an earthquake the gas will kill the couple of million people living nearby. The world’s nastiest volcano erupts nearby every two years. There are two other giant volcanoes standing by. So such an earthquake is a high possibility.

These massive towering doom-laden mountains are kindly in comparison to the destruction and mayhem created by man there. It is almost unbelievable that people try to live normal lives there.

Kivu a place so foreign and terrible, that it might be from another time or another planet.

It is an explosive setting for Jim, my hero from The Armageddon Trade to be tipped into.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Armageddon-Trade-Clem-Chambers/dp/1842433105/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251637402&sr=1-1

In the next few weeks the final draft will be whipped into shape.