Larry Porter, pensioner and part-time lecturer at a Dublin university, is on his way into the local bank, to negotiate a car loan, just as the bank is being robbed by Sandor Popps gang. Years earlier Larry had given German grinds to the talented young Hungarian, now a billionaire drugs baron. Along with the other terrified bank customers, Larry is taken hostage by the criminals, and imprisoned in an underground bunker. He is convinced that they will all suffer a hideous death at the hands of the gangs psychopathic second-in-command. Much to his own surprise, Larrys self-preservation instinct clicks in and transforms the harmless old pensioner into a very violent survivor, intent on bringing his former brilliant pupil to justice

Pierce Purcell was born in 1939 in Wexford, Ireland, and grew up in Wicklow Town, a seaside resort south of Dublin. After graduating from University College Dublin in 1962, he worked as a secondary teacher in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary until his retirement in 2000. He and his wife Maureen, a well known local artist who helped to design the cover of this book, have four adult children and eight grandchildren, at the last count. In addition to teaching, Pierce spent many years as a part-time official in the secondary teachers' trade union, and is at present the General Secretary of the German Teachers' Association of Ireland. In 2006 he taught English for a semester in the University for Nationalities in Guiyang, China. He is a former member of the Senate of the National University of Ireland. Among his many interests are classical music, fast cars, long-distance running and foreign travel. In this, Pierce's first novel, the reader is furnished with a graphic picture of certain aspects of life in Ireland from the early 1960s up to the present day, while following the careers of both a ruthless criminal and an apparently harmless old pensioner.