The Fixer

Description

A rip-roaring thriller set behind the scenes of the modern boxing world Ray Lester is a fixer in the boxing business. He makes fights happen. He builds a bridge and guides boxers across to the negotiating table. Ray Lester is good at his job. One morning, a girl arrives at Ray's door and asks him for help finding her father, an old-school Vegas crooner called Eddie Lights. Ray travels with his questions to Sin City, along with 30,000 other Brits with their Union Jacks on the way to watch Hatton take on Mayweather. But the boys in leather jackets from back east are on his tail and Ray finds himself embroiled in a murderous plot. So begins a journey into the murky world of deals, fights and fighters. A world beyond the glitz, glamour and glory. A world where the fixer is king.

Steve Bunce has worked as a journalist and broadcaster since 1984, writing about boxing for the Daily Telegraph for a decade and since 1999 at the Independent, as well as having a column in Boxing Monthly and for ESPN.com. He has been at six Olympic Games, reported on more than fifty fights in Las Vegas and covered bouts in over twenty countries. He is a regular on BBC Radio Five Live, working on their monthly show since 2004, the weekly podcast and all major live fights. He has been part of the broadcast team at BoxNation since 2011 and also holds various ridiculous records on the BBC's award-winning Fighting Talk.

Reads like a Raymond Chandler for the twenty-first century . . . As a thriller writer, Steve Bunce wipes the floor with Stieg Larsson -- Tony Parsons * Daily Mirror * A devastating evocation of the way the sport functions at its basest level -- George Kimball, author of the bestselling Four Kings One of only a handful of recent additions to a genre once distinguished by men like Leonard "Fat City" Gardner and Budd "The Harder They Fall" Schulberg * The Independent * What Bunce has done brilliantly in The Fixer is to borrow heavily from his decades in and around boxing as participant, commentator and salesman to tell a fictional tale that is disturbingly close to the real thing * The Observer * The story crackles with so much authenticity that you can almost smell the stale sweat and leather as you turn the pages * Sport Magazine *