Book Review. Drug Run by Mervyn Billot

BOOK REVIEW. A retired Jersey agricultural engineer, Mervyn Billot, has continued a second career as an author by writing an adventure novel: Drug Run.

The book draws on his own experiences of cruising in Channel Island and Brittany waters. It is set in the Channel Islands and off the coast of France in the 1980s, and shows that rip-roaring tales of adventure on the high seas still find a market.

It tells the tale of a retired couple, Winter and Nicola La Cloche, whose yacht is hijacked by drug runners who plan to use the couple as a front to deliver their stash of narcotics.

It is action-packed book, filled with incident, plot twists and daring deeds.

It is a complete change of subject for Billot, whose previous book was a scholarly history of agricultural tools in Jersey.

Born in 1925 in Jersey of an old Jersey family, he was brought up on a farm and left before the Germany occupation for the islands during world war two. In 1943 he joined the navy and served for the last two years of the war in the Far East before becoming an agricultural engineer. He worked in the agricultural machinery manufacturing business in the UK for many years before opening his own garden machinery retail business. Nineteen years later he retired to Jersey and now lives in the Billot family home.