Jack and the Lad (The Barrow Boys of Barking Book 1)

A West End girl who lusted after East End boys, the debutante circuit's darling who the critics christened ‘Minty Hardcore’ is - long after being walled up alive in St. Margaret’s church, Barking - now just another East End legend, alongside the Krays and Jack the Ripper. Fast forward a few hundred years; Jack Woodfield, Barking barrow boy turned bourgeois beefcake, is desperate to ditch West Ham United, larking around Barking market, and mostly his belligerent baby brother Jamie. It's time for Jack to move on and take his savvy to the City; time to lose the legends that say as a baby he was baptised in a 'testosterone spring' that flows from the font of the family church of St. Margaret’s. Any talk of past uncles and their paranormal romances, of 'entities from Essex' and ‘doomed debutantes’ are rot as far as Jack is concerned. He wants to make himself into the modern, metrosexual man he knows his mum would be so proud of. He’s the pole star around which his family revolves. But Jack wants to see the back of Barking, and Jamie can't wait to see the back of him either; as far as he's concerned Jack is one babe-magnet best sent packing, and pronto. In fact, you might say that Jack Woodfield has it sorted; he’s got brains, brawn, and sightly bulges. Sat at his desk in the City he’s a modern man with a lad’s legacy that he’d rather leave behind, especially his fellow carouser, hell-raising cousin Hayden 'the lad' Woodfield. But over Jack’s shoulder lurks the frisky phantom who has Hayden in her clutches, and whose preternatural passion for burly barrow boys might well screw up Jack's prospects for promotion and a cosmopolitan, carefree existence rather royally... Can Jack’s soaring City career be saved, or will Hayden lever him out of London and back to Barking, where he'll be doomed to spend the rest of his days bogged down in cheap bling and flexing his biceps on demand, the brainless, swaggering slave of that saucy, bawdy spook the paranormal messageboards also call ‘Minty Hardcore’?!?