Death is not the end (of the detective)

I thought I’d spend a couple of minutes of your time talking about what I’ve been up to since the start of the year.

The release of Mama’s Gone, the final book in the Lagotti Family series, launched in March to critical acclaim and I also had a record sales month. So thank you if you were kind enough to buy the novel.

From January I started work on a female sleuth story featuring Becky Greene. I’ve previously talked about this and won’t repeat myself again. I have also mentioned I was finding this a tough tale to get written and, two weeks ago, I decided to shelve the damn thing. The first draft was four months of my time and I was only halfway through when normally I would have completed the first draft with a month to spare.

I can’t begin to describe the weight that lifted from my shoulders the instant I made the decision to jettison the parachute and go into freefall. The first thing I did was to think how I could reuse the characters I had already invented and then I settled down to edit two books which I hadn’t finished getting ready for publication. The first is a stand-alone story – a steamy thriller involving financial crime set in the UK and the second is the first book in a new series, set in the US. The lead character is Alex Cohen and we will follow his life from 1915 when he arrives in Ellis Island through to the end of the 1970s.

Both books will launch September to November this year and Alex sequels will drop in 2020 and 2021. Of course, my latest release, The Case goes live on Amazon on June 23 and can be picked up now. It’s in paperback too if you prefer a more hard copy feel to your heading.