SOUTH Devon writer Gary Freemantle has just published his first thriller and already it is getting rave reviews on Amazon.

When Gary, pictured far right, returned home to South Devon after 30 years working for global corporations, he decided to combine his knowledge of the dark side of the corporate world with his boyhood love of the sea, and write a thriller.

Ogrefish has just been published on Amazon, and is roller-coaster of  a novel, full of action and based on scientific fact.

It centres around a ruthless entrepreneur, born in South Devon, who tries single-handedly to tackle climate change and inadvertently brings a monster up from the ocean depths

‘I just hope it doesn’t put readers off swimming in our wonderful waters’ said Gary, whose other interests include amateur dramatics with The Teignmouth Players. He is also a very keen tennis player at Cary Park Tennis Club in Torquay.

‘It involves biotechnology and conspiracy theory, and I like to think of it as being in the genre of Michael Crichton. A horror story only a step away from reality and actual events.’

Billionaire visionary Penny Crawford has created luxury tourist resorts bytransforming barren regions of the Earth into mini paradises teeming with life. With a steely belief in her ability to control nature, she now has a grand plan to use the oceans to reverse global warming.

She tests the plan at her new resort in the Maldives, but it results in forcing a deadly and vicious deep-sea creature to the surface: the silver-fanged, milk-eyed Ogrefish.

Crawford’s marketing manager Will Sanders and Plymouth University marine biologist Fiona Bell begin to suspect a connection between fatal attacks at the resort and the sea creature.

Their own lives are put in peril as they travel to Shanghai, Bavaria and back to the Maldives to investigate. They race to stop Crawford before she can escalate her plan which now poses a threat to all life on Earth.

The book jacket is designed by Devon artist Victoria Stevens from Shaldon. She said: ‘Gary let me read the book before it was published and it was a real page-turner from start to finish. It certainly gave me great inspiration for the cover design’.

Gary was born and educated in Plymouth and now lives in the South Devon village of Holcombe near Teignmouth.

► Ogrefish is available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle eBook.