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Dear readers,
It has been a long while since my last update, and you must be surprised to hear from me again. My second book, Unnatural Ends (formerly titled Cat’s Paw) was released back in 2023 and should be available through all the usual channels; and now, I’d like to announce the upcoming release of my third book, A Pretender’s Murder, currently set for July 2025 in North America and September 2025 in the UK.
Yes, that’s "upcoming release", not "pre-order campaign". It seems as though A Gentleman’s Murder was successful enough that no pre-order campaign was required for its sequel. So what is this sequel, then? Well ...
It’s the spring of 1925, and Eric Peterkin is settling into his position as the newly installed club secretary of the Britannia Club. Until elections can be held, the acting club president is Colonel Hadrian Russell: charming, magnanimous, immensely popular, a man who began the War with four strapping sons and ended it with four widowed daughters-in-law. But when the Colonel is shot and thrown bodily through one of the front upstairs windows of the club, Eric is called upon once again to investigate. The quest takes him through Paris to an isolated Swiss sanatorium and back, before putting him on a manhunt for an elusive former spy. As it turns out, the intrigues born on the home front are no less deadly for having occurred while the men were miles away.
Does that pique your interest? Then keep an eye out for it! In the meantime, I’ll be over here working on a third mystery for our friend Eric Peterkin ...
Happy Canada Day, everyone. 2019 is half over, and there’ve been a number of developments since my last update.
First of all, I’m pleased to report that A Gentleman’s Murder won the silver for Mystery in the 2018 Foreword Indies. This makes a neat little hat trick for Inkshares, with Jacqui Castle’s The Seclusion and Juliet McDaniel’s Mr. and Mrs. American Pie also winning silver in their respective categories.
A German edition of A Gentleman’s Murder is also in the works and set to come out in December this year.
Some long-overdue paperwork was finally completed with respect to the option for the TV rights, so I think I can more comfortably say now that that’s in the works, too.
The most significant update I have to share, however, is that I have since relocated from Montreal to Calgary, a move that takes me to the other side of the continent. I’m writing this from what should be my study for the foreseeable future, once the movers deliver all my stuff.
It’s a new life. Perhaps there will be Bovril.
Until next time!
A happy new year to everyone, and all the best for 2019! We’re kicking things off with an interview with Battles of the First World War, a podcast which delivers exactly what it says in the name, a comprehensive examination of individual WW1 battles. Mike, who runs the podcast, took a break from the trenches to have a few words with me about my own military experience and how it relates to my fiction.
So, things seem to be going well. Over on Amazon.com, we’re just four (4) reviews short of fifty. I’m told that fifty reviews is when Amazon begins to take a book seriously, and starts doing a bit of the work in pushing it -- which in turn means I and everyone at Inkshares can devote more energy to creating the next book. So if you haven’t left an Amazon review yet, please do.
As for the "next book", an initial draft of "Cat’s Paw" has been written; tomorrow, I begin working on the next draft. I think we should be getting definitive news within a few days about whether it’ll be chosen as one of the "additional winners" of the Mystery & Thriller contest. Fingers crossed!
(Pre-ordering now should entitle you to a signed first edition, by the way. I admit that I never really understood the draw of things signed by me -- unless it’s a cheque -- but I was recently contacted by a bookseller asking for a signed copy of "A Gentleman’s Murder", so clearly I know nothing about how these things work.)
Meanwhile, I’ve also been working on a pilot screenplay (there’s a possibility I might be tapped to write the proposed TV adaptation of "A Gentleman’s Murder" myself) and catching up with my reading. On Inkshares, the latest projects to have caught my interest are "Goodbye Horses" and "All That Glitters". "Goodbye Horses" is a comedy; there’s murder involved, of course, but primarily it’s about the madcap woes of a Texas small town sheriff. "All That Glitters" is a mystery woven through one woman’s relationship with her parents when repeated murder attempts come knocking. So, yeah, check ’em out.
And have fun!