HE IS WHAT HE IS, BECAUSE. . .

This brief excerpt from "BRETT ENTERS THE SQUARE CIRCLE" is taken from the scene that takes place just minutes before BRETT is scheduled to step into the ring against the man who'd once chewed off part of his right earlobe, and he has it out with Sergeant Joe Raff who's been trying to help prepare him for his upcoming match.

These words, spoken by BRETT, might shed some light on how it came about that he ended up becoming such an UNSCRUPULOUS BASTARD:

“Yeah, you’ve been trying to use me all this time, old man – You got a score to settle with that guy, and you thought you’d get a hold of good old Brett Cornell, the guy every cop would like to see dead and buried – the guy everybody calls an unscrupulous bastard and all that – the guy nobody gives a damn about, just like my old man and my old lady never gave a damn about me either, and never cared about what happened to me, just as long as it didn’t inconvenience them! – But that’s a whole other story.” 

I stopped just then, not because I was out of breath or simply had reached the end of a sentence. I stopped just then because I had to! – because a horrible emotion suddenly took hold of me, and I felt choked because of it – but it lasted only for a moment, so I continued,

 “ – You just figured you could use me to do your dirty work for you, and nobody’d care one way or the other if I took a horrible beating, or got put in a hospital or in a wheel-chair for the rest of my life, or ended up brain-dead like you said might happen—Just so long as you got a shot at taking your personal little revenge on Gil Bailey!” And then, after taking in a deep breath so as to replenish the good old oxygen supply, I gave one more short and brittle laugh and said, "You gonna be a man, then, and admit it? – or you gonna go on, trying to convince both me and you, that you’ve been trying to help me ‘cause you got a good heart and you care about me and all that other  happy  horseshit, that don’t make sense to me and don’t make sense to nobody else that has half a brain?”

"BRETT ENTERS THE SQUARE CIRCLE" is presently occupying the position of being the 5th book in the BRETT CORNELL SERIES --

So, stay tuned for several more extracts from this novel, as well as others in the series.

Thanks for reading this!

Dave