Caught In The Crossfire is the currently incomplete novel, being written by young Scottish author Bobby Graham and hopefully published upon completion. The storyline is set in modern day. The first and prime character in the story is Charles Rutherford, but other main characters include Larisa Ford, Sydney Keating Clarke, William Collard, Emily Cartwright and Amanda Violet Harris.

Plot summary

Caught In The Crossfire is an adventure themed novel, revolving mainly around six children. Charles Rutherford and Will Collard, both sixteen years old, are the initial characters and soon find themselves in possession of some papers that they believe will put them in danger. Their fears are confirmed after both are abducted at the Swiss/French border en route to Switzerland on a trip organised by their school. Two of their closest friends, Lara Ford and Emily Cartwright, are the only people that the boys confided in and before long they are taken as well. Sydney Clarke is the only witness to the captures, but when he tries to escape, fleeing for his life, he suffers from an epileptic fit and is admitted to hospital. Even there he is not safe and is taken as well.

All of the children are lost in places that they do not know and discover that they are the guniea pigs of an advanced biological experiment: they have been cloned. Battling the mirror reflections of themselves to get home, they uncover some dangerous information, compromising the secret services of several powerful countries, including Britain. The five children have limited help from the few people who are working to prevent the evil deeds being carried out and also one of their own friends who has made a gigantic effort to find them.

They must escape from their captors, survive dangerous adversaries hell-bent on silencing them at any cost, a nuclear explosive test site, a biological test facility, icy precipices, underground labyrinths, terrorists, secret services and conspiracies. Six children are left to do so much; who will survive? Will there be a World War 3?

Character backgrounds

NOTE: The following will reveal several aspects of the plot. If you have not read the novel then some information here may give it away.

Charles (Charlie) Rutherford

Charles grew up without a father and doted on his gentle, kind mother, Anne. After his mother was shot dead by armed robbers in a bank robbery, Charles - at only 11 years old - suffered a mental breakdown and had controlled anti-depressants prescribed along with pyshciatric sessions. Ever since, he has had problems making and maintaining relationships with anybody, even his Aunt Kay and Uncle Frederic, his new guardians.

Struggling to cope with school and feeling more alone than ever, he searched for the anti-depressants and attempted suicide. Luckily, best friend Will Collard had predicted the move and rescued him. Charles has regretted feeling an uncontrollable reliance upon Will.

He once discovered some of his mother's old belongings and among them was an old diary, possibly belonging to his "dead" father. He checks out the address but decides that the elevator breaking down was a bad sign and runs away.

William (Will) Collard

Will lived with a child- and wife-beating alcoholic as a father for ten years of his life and from a very young age he had seen and felt what no ten-year-old should have.

He was a pillar of support for best friend Charles after he broke down. Will would never let people know about his father, even after he was dead. Will and his father went out fishing once and during an argument, they both fell into the sea. Will would certainly have drowned if it had not been for a man sailing by on his boat. His father's body was never discovered.

He managed to see that Charles planned to take his own life and intervened. Will saved his life. He now lives as an only child with his mother, Carol, whose surname he adopted after his father drowned.

Larisa (Lara) Ford

Lara led a perfectly happy life with happily married parents Graeme and Sarah and younger, close brother Dominic. However, Lara found her life shattered after a car crash killed her brother and left her mother in a wheelchair and excluding from her own mum, Lara walked away from the crash as the sole survivor.

Lara grieved painfully after Dominic died and was preparing to move on when she noticed her parents' strange behaviour. She could see that her mother's disability was a titanic strain on the relationship and they were drifting apart. They rarely spoke and Lara found herself as the only connection in a ruined marriage.

Emily Cartwright

Emily Cartwright is a very private person. She keeps few friends but occasionally talks to Lara and Amanda, and is only close to Charles, with whom she speaks frequently.

Emily's father, physics teacher Mr. (Siegfried) Cartwright, is her sole parent and although her mother is alive, Siegfried refuses to fill Emily in on the details. Due to a life of neglect, Emily fell by the wayside and found herself regularly injecting morphine into her leg. She was barely a teenager and was already an addict.

After one fix she got trapped in an elevator where she could easily have been stuck for days without being noticed. Worse still, she suffered from diabetes and was dehydrating. The lights went out and she suffered a panic attack, her claustrophobia leading her to beleive that the walls were crushing her.

Sydney Keating Clarke

Sydney is the notorious bully at school and a spoiled bully too. He belongs to a very wealthy family, his father being a car dealer and his mother being a children's fiction writer. He would get whatever he wanted and thought that he was better than most people at his school. He picked on many people, but Charles and Emily were more commonly the subjects of his abuse than anybody else was.

After going out sailing with his father, Douglas Clarke, he was abducted after awaking to find that his father had dived overboard. His hostages demanded (to be filled in) for his release. However Sydney found a way to worm free from his binds and escaped. With a shotgun in his possession he charged from the building and accidentally shot a woman at close range when she stepped in his way. He ran for miles from the house where he had been taken before informing police of who he was. He never heard of the woman he shot.

Also during a holiday in the Swiss Alps with his family, Sydney lost control of his skis and badly injured himself then landed on the deserted side of a mountain. Rescue came just in time before pnuemonia killed him.

Amanda Violet Harris

She lived most of her life with two sets of her parents. Her mother and father divorced when she was young and quickly remarried. She stayed with her father and stepmother Victory, a demanding and domineering woman with a short fuse. Amanda constantly feels Victory's wrath whenever she gets something wrong.

Victory demands that Amanda participates in several sports and activites. This is stress that young Amanda does not need and she begins harming herself to let out the anger and frustration. The scars on her arm are always well concealed with long-sleeved shirts.

Amanda was on the Swiss trip but returned home before it was over due to the kidnapping of four children (Sydney hadn't yet been kidnapped by then). She then discovered that on her camera there were pictures that could be vital evidence in the investigation. Lara was her best friend and she would do anything to help her, even if that meant running after her.