The Nantucket Sleighride — James Philip

The Nantucket Sleighride is the third Frankie Ransom story. Nantucket Sleighride (description: from Wikipedia) â€" ‘A Nantucket sleighride was a term used by Nantucket whale men to describe what occurs immediately following the harpooning of a whale. The whale, realizing it had been harpooned, would attempt to flee and thus drag the whaleboat along with it... The length of the drag for the sailors would last as long as the whale could swim before it became exhausted..' Eighteen months after her rescue from the hands of murderous Balkan gangsters Frankie is finally resuming her full-time career in the Met. The trouble is that the Met has fallen out of love with her, and in her heart, she's afraid she's fallen out of love with it. She'd been promised a ‘proper' police job in the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, what she'd got wasn't even close. She'd been promised she'd be working with an elite team of experienced detectives, what she'd got was a squad of malcontents, troublemakers and time-servers. And worst of all, she discovers she's been appointed London's unofficial ‘Celebrity Cop'. As if to add insult to injury, Professional Standards are on her case. Not because she's done anything wrong but because the very thing she'd been afraid of all along has happened: she has become the story. So, when somebody breaks into a prestigious Oxford Street gallery and destroys the most famous painting of the New England School, The Nantucket Sleighride, a priceless World Heritage Treasure, Frankie is back in the news. Big Time. Immediately, London's Celebrity Cop is pitted against the secretive, uncooperative art establishment aided and abetted by the Met's own Fine Arts and Antiquities Squad. Within days she finds herself embroiled in a century-old feud between two rich and powerful New England families. Then the mutilated body of a young woman with the same name as a nineteenth century whale ship is dragged out of the River Thames. Suddenly, like the long dead whale hunters depicted in the sweeping narrative seascape of The Nantucket Sleighride, Frankie finds herself being swept faster and faster into a dangerous maelstrom of family, political and sexual tensions; and rushing headlong towards a new and unexpected turning point in her life, riding her own, very personal Nantucket Sleighride.