Planning & Editing: A guest post by Richard Farren Barber

My fine friend Richard Farren Barber has a new novella out from Crystal Lake Publishing called Twenty Years Dead (it's very good) and to help celebrate it, he's contributed the following guest post.

After twenty years in the ground, the dead briefly rise. At his father’s grave, this is Dave’s last opportunity to discover why a man would abandon his wife and young son. Against the protests of his mother and his girlfriend, Dave is determined to learn what happened all those years ago. Sometimes you have to risk everything, but the dead don’t give up their secrets so easily.

Twenty Years Dead is a novella of quiet horror, which explores families and their secrets.

Come listen when the Dead speak...

* * *

You'd have thought after thirty plus years (gulp) I'd have a handle on this writing malarkey. Write. Edit. Publish.

Simples.

And sometimes that's exactly how it works. My most recently published novella is Twenty Years Dead and that was a straightforward delivery. The first draft was written in 4 weeks and then it took a few more weeks for editing before it was ready to go out.

Not so much the current novella. It's not hideously complex but I've already had to pull it apart and restructure it, shifting around scenes, deleting chapters and adding new material. And still it’s very, very wrong.

It’s not necessarily the chronology of the story which creates complications – in both cases the story follows a conventional storyline, but sometimes it’s clear from reading the first draft that something has gone awry. For me it’s often about character motivation, or development. It’s often the case that something just doesn’t feel right.

There's a part of me which loves the dissection: it’s very satisfying taking something apart, figuring out how it actually works and how it should work. But here's the thing; once you start messing with the order of your first draft it quickly unravels. It reminds me of times as a child when I took apart a toy only to discover I couldn't put it back together again. After a few hours of focussed play you find yourself with a handful of plastic pieces and a knot of wires and rubber bands.

(Quick aside for those brought up in the seventies: The Casdon tabletop football game used a *lot* of strings to make those players move. Who knew?)

You put your story together in what you think is the right order and suddenly characters gain knowledge they can't possess, or reference events which have not happened. It's amazing how complicated simple things can become.

When I'm sitting there staring at my disembowelled story there is a temptation to shove all the guts back in and just hope no-one notices. Even when the major structural work is done and all the scenes are in the right order the details continue to trip me up. It can be something as miniscule as realising you’ve referenced a building which no longer exists, or by introducing characters in a different order they need to change their view on events.

I often find myself wondering whether any reader would spot the inconsistencies or whether I'm self-flagellating. I suspect someone would, but in truth I don't know. But I’d know, and I think that’s the only thing I can offer as a writer: integrity.

Every time I am editing a story I wish I planned my tales better and I promise myself next time I'll write a proper outline. Outlining seems like the Holy Grail as a writer. When I begin writing a new story I usually have a very clear vision of the beginning and an understanding of the end but the middle tends to be hazy. Some of the characters in Twenty Years Dead were known to me from the outset while others bloomed into existence as the pages racked up. For me, that discovery during the first draft is one of the real joys of writing; I just need to find a way to do it before I start page one.

The book can be purchased from Amazon on this link, available in paperback and ebook editions

* * *

Me & Richard in Nottingham during a Crusty Exterior
meet-up in April 2019 I wrote about here

Richard Farren Barber was born in Nottingham in July 1970. After studying in London he returned to the East Midlands. He lives with his wife and son and works as a manager for a local university.

He has over 80 short stories published, seven novellas: “The Power of Nothing”, “The Sleeping Dead”, “Odette”, “Perfect Darkness, Perfect Silence”, “Closer Still”, “All Hell.” , and “Twenty Years Dead.” His two novels are: “The Living and the Lost” and “The Screaming Dead” (Co-authored with Peter Mark May).

Richard can be found online at the following links:

w: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk

f: www.facebook.com/richardfarrenbarber

t: www.twitter.com/RFarrenBarber

Skin For Skin, by Terry Grimwood - review & guest essay

In a new edition of the occasional series, I want to tell you about a book I've read and loved, which I think adds to the horror genre and that I think you'll enjoy if you're a fan.  And as a bonus, Terry has contributed an essay explaining where the story came from.

"And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life." Job 2:4

Troublesome priest Eve Clements is exiled from her North London parish to remote St Jude's, miles from the nearest village.

Carrying childhood demons with her, broken relationships and addiction, she becomes an unwilling pawn in a supernatural battle that keeps her confined within the parish grounds, with a congregation that is not what it seems.

Eve must find her purpose if she is to survive, as terrifying apparitions and her own emotional fragility drive her towards breaking point. 

My review of "Skin For Skin", based on the one that originally appeared in Parsec magazine, issue 1:

When troubled - and troublesome - priest Eve Clements is exiled from her North London parish, she accepts an offer to minister at St Judes, a small church in deepest Suffolk.  Bearing the load of childhood demons and the trauma of a recently ended relationship, she quickly discovers all is not as it seems. St Judes, it quickly transpires, is a focal point of supernatural activity and Eve becomes an unwilling pawn in the centre of an epic battle between good and evil. In order to survive, she must find purpose as terrifying apparitions push her already fragile emotional stability to breaking point.

The novella mostly takes place in and around St Jude’s and Grimwood makes excellent use of the location, situated as it is two miles from the nearest village of Weddon “because of the Black Death”. The narrow roads, ploughed fields, dense hedgerows and hidden copse’s both expand the scope and draw in the claustrophobia, isolating Eve more and more from the reality she’s struggling to deal with. The weather also plays a part, storms locking her in further and reducing visibility until the reader can almost feel the rain striking their skin. The church of St Jude itself is all odd angles and weird stained glass and when we later find out what happened to it in the 18th Century, it’s dislocation makes all the more sense.

Eve’s character is well defined and drawn and opening the novella with a harrowing drugs bust, told entirely from her seven-year-old point of view is a masterstroke, the reader having to fill in the blanks as “The Shouting People” invade her squalid home. It also sets up the course of her life, missing her junkie mother and struggling with New Mum & Dad before entering priesthood, a path we don’t see but encounter when things have already started to go badly wrong. Dedicated to her faith and her flock in the run-down North London parish of St Martin’s, Eve is a thorn in the side of the establishment and when she gets involved with a local mother whose son has died because of drug dealing, it brings her into direct conflict with her bishop. Her growing relationship with local would-be councillor Ruth doesn’t help either. Although we meet the new flock - to say more would give the game away - we only really engage with Angela, the deacon who invited Eve to move and her duplicitous character works well, throwing the reader and Eve off alike, before revealing her true colours in a masterful twist that properly took me by surprise.

Grimwood does a good job, updating and paraphrasing the Job story and although much is made of the religious struggle - both internal and what is actually happening within St Jude’s - this is much more about human relationships and loneliness, especially how people cope with it. It’s never treated sentimentally and never seems manipulative, but being alone and trying to deal with it drives almost all of the characters, from the orphan Eve who has burned every bridge to Ruth, who suffer even when surrounded by supposedly close friends and family. And for those that don’t know (I had to look it up), “skin for skin” comes from Satan doing physical harm to Job, to see if Job will stay faithful to God.

My only gripe is that I didn’t get a real sense of where Eve found her faith that’s strong enough to force her to do things that will, often, only create more agony for her but part of that might be my reading of it (as a long-standing Agnostic).

Told with a decent pace, the twin storylines interweave well and dispense information slowly, giving the reader time to absorb different steps and how they interlink and this is all the better for it. Solidly written, with some wonderful turns of phrase and a keen sense of location and atmosphere, this is a very good read from a writer who gets better with every piece of work. I would very much recommend it.

* * *

Guest blog essay by Terry Grimwood

The Strange Tale of Job, Revisited

So, what’s the story behind my novella Skin For Skin? Is it the product of a fevered imagination? Yes. Are its roots buried deep into my out-in-the-sticks upbringing? Absolutely. Does it owe anything to Hope-Hodgson’s House on the Borderland? You bet it does. And The Book of Job? Most certainly, although not until the story was underway and I began to understand what I was trying to write.

Much of my fiction has a religious undercurrent. My plays, Tattletale Mary, Jar of Flies and The Bayonet all have ministers as key characters. Soul Masque is a somewhat brutal look at the war between God and the Devil. Deadside Revolution features a fallen angel and a conflict in Hell, and my novella, Joe, explores the agony of trying to reconcile sexuality with religious belief. 

I come from a long line of Baptists, so religion, by which I mean Western Christianity, has played some part in my life for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I was a regular at an Anglican Sunday School and was even educated at a Church of England-funded primary school. 

At the age of 10 or 11, however, I voluntarily transferred my spiritual obligations to one-service-a-week at the Baptist Chapel my parents attended, because continued Sunday School membership meant joining the church choir. There was no way I was going to wear a dress, frilly collar, and sing in a girl’s voice (no disrespect to girls’ voices, they are beautiful, but I think you know where I’m coming from). Such was my need to escape, I was prepared to endure interminable, ancient hymns, ground out on an equally prehistoric harmonium and hour-long sermons delivered by a regular cycle of thee-and-thou preachers who had stepped straight out of the Edwardian era. I love those old hymns nowadays, by the way. There’s power in their language.

So, the idea of God, Jesus, the Bible, prophets, apostles and all the rest were inculcated into my system from my first awareness. Predictably, I kicked against it when a teenager, embraced it with great fervour in my early twenties, then watched my faith slip like sand from my tightly clenched fist as I entered my thirties.

I still believe, but can no longer subscribe to the organised structures of the faith I once cherished. They are riddled with too many tightly-tangled philosophical conundrums that I cannot simply shove aside. Yet the wonder of it remains. Think about it. A being so vast, ancient and powerful it could create and sustain a universe. The enigmatic references in the early chapters of The Bible to the “Sons of God” who came down to Earth to take human women to wife. Enigmatic characters such as Enoch who simply “walked with God and was not” and yet, looms large over ancient Biblical history. Nimrod the Hunter, who or what was he? A catastrophic global flood, the sun travelling backwards in the sky. Plagues. A sea being ripped part into two towering walls of water to allow safe passage for an entire nation. 

And Job…

Ah, yes, the strange and terrible story of Job.

A rich, devout man, he seems to have caught the attention of Satan, who comes before God to issue a challenge. Take everything from Job, leave him ruined and broken, and he will “curse thee to thy face”. Astonishingly, God gives Satan permission to rip Job’s life apart, which he does with great enthusiasm. Job’s entire family and all his livestock are killed, his home demolished and his crops destroyed. Job, himself, is afflicted with sores and left to rot. It is an act of immense cruelty, a life trampled into the dust simply to settle a dispute.

History or parable, the story of Job portrays God as more concerned with scoring a point than caring about one of His creations. Yes, ultimately Job was rewarded for his steadfastness, but why did the poor guy and his family have to suffer all this in the first place? 

Like most of my extended fiction, Skin For Skin evolved from a completely different idea, then found a life of its own. It always feels to me as if stories already exist and it is the writer’s task to uncover them. If that is the case, then this one was buried deep. I found myself being drawn deeper into the heart and soul of the main protagonist, Eve, and realised that she is, in many ways, the personification of my own bruised spirituality. 

Unlike me, she is a courageous, difficult and principled person who was born into terrible poverty and neglect. The darkness of her early childhood is the engine for her faith, and passion (if not obsession) for helping those in trouble. Crushed by the enormity of the burden, her own sense of right and wrong and then by the religious establishment who see her as a troublesome priest determined to disrupt the status quo, she is exiled to a remote church, located in a storm-ravaged, otherworldly landscape - the same lonely East Anglian landscapes I walked as a child.

Like Job, Eve’s life is shattered through no fault of her own. She chooses what she sees as the Right Path and ends up broken and cast out. Then, once in exile, she discovers that she is once more to be a used as a pawn in The Game.

I think that the root of my religion-themed writing is anger at the idea that the complex, wondrous entities God has created, beings capable of beautiful art, mind-bending technology and acts of immense compassion, are simply cannon fodder in the war between “good” and “evil” and damned to Hell if they don’t subscribe to this or that point of doctrine. I don’t believe that to be the case. Any God big and powerful enough to create an infinite universe can fight His own battles. We, as the end of Skin For Skin declares, are here for each other.

* * *

Terry Grimwood is a writer, electrician, college lecturer, actor, amateur theatre director and musician, who, in what little spare time he has, has published a number of novels and novellas.  

His short fiction has appeared in many anthologies and magazines and has been collected in two volumes, The Exaggerated Man and There Is A Way To Live Forever. 

He directed the first performances of his own plays, The Bayonet, Tattletale Mary and Tales From The Nightside, the scripts for which are available from theEXAGGERATEDpress and in addition to fiction, has co-written a number of engineering and electrical installation text books. 

He likes to misquote the legendary Football manager Bill Shankley by claiming that writing is not about life and death...it is much more important than that.

Terry can be found online at theEXAGGERATEDpress website and on Facebook.

The Damocles Files Vol 1: Ragnarok Rising, by Benedict J. Jones & Anthony Watson

To mark the publication of their new novel, Ragnarok Rising, I hand over the blog to a guest post from my friends Benedict Jones and Anthony Watson.

As the fires of conflict engulf the globe and empires vie for dominance, a secondary shadow war is being fought for control of the worlds occult treasures, among them the keys to the prisons of long forgotten, sleeping gods. Allied academics join forces with soldiers in a desperate race to halt the machinations of the Axis powers and shadowy cults with their own agendas.

Welcome to the world of Damocles.

BJJ: What started out as an attempt to write a joint collection of horror stories themed around the second world war quickly escalated into something bigger. Why don’t we link all the stories in some way? An overarching narrative perhaps… Well, I do have this one idea… The next thing we knew we were well on our way to 110,000 words and found ourselves building a whole world. In creating this world we knew from the off that we wanted to anchor the dark fantastic in the real history of the second world war; major events still occur when they did, units and regiments are where they were at a specific time. But, behind these real events other, darker, things are occurring.

In drawing up the characters who make up the Damocles organisation and populate the world around them we wanted to make sure that they were all too human with all the fragility which that brings. These are people plucked from the worlds of academia and the military and thrust into life or death conflicts with forces they can barely comprehend. Soldiers and scholars are dispatched to be used as cannon fodder for “the greater good”, mirroring the sacrifices made in the actual war, and we wanted to try and showcase the effects that this would have upon our protagonists. The true facts of the conflict are hidden from some of those involved, the truth being simply too terrible. Scholars, book hounds, assassins and occultists mix with bureaucrats, hobbyists, criminals and squaddies. It was important to us that their stories, with an eye to realism, were told as well as that of the epic struggle to prevent Ragnarok.

Location. Location. Location. Whether it is musty libraries in London, the streets of Istanbul, the desert wastes of north Africa, cave systems in the outer Hebrides, the barren arctic, or war-ravaged Berlin we wanted to imbue each tale with a real sense of place. This was done to try and illustrate the scope and range of the second world war. It truly was a global event that touched almost every corner of the world in one way or another.

The influences that we drew upon in developing the world of Damocles were wide ranging, drawing upon spy literature, historical sources, action and adventure pulps, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and Norse mythology to name but a few. The Hellboy universe provided some touch points of inspiration as did various other works that involve “weird world war two”. Structure wise we aimed for a fractured narrative with characters coming into and out of the story at various points. The steampunk novel The Difference Engine helped with this in some ways, being an example of where this had been done before. Stories within stories and tales within tales. There is a heroic undercurrent to many of the stories but we tried to temper this by showing the real, often damaging, results of such heroism. One of the wonderful things about creating our world from scratch meant that we were able to draw upon a multitude of sources for influence as well as providing us with ample scope for the freedom to create and add our own inventions.

The act of writing is generally a solitary one. Writing with someone else can be a very different experience. The act of creation became a shared one in which we could both act as a sounding board for the other and in turn add our own ideas to the mix. These “idea sessions” really allowed for us to spark off each other’s creativity. It allowed us to avoid dead ends and cul-de-sacs of imagination and planning which not only allowed us to speed up the writing process but to create and develop the world around the characters very efficiently and fully. It also made it easier to overcome those writer’s block moments which can stall a work. Particularly difficult scenes for one writer could be passed to the other for completion and we utilised that at several points. The whole process has been one that was, and continues to be, thoroughly enjoyed by us both.

We produced Wings in the Darkness, an expansion on one of the shorter pieces in the novel, as an introduction and access point to the world of Damocles. The novella works well to lay out a lot of the themes and ideas which are expanded upon in the novel, Ragnarok Rising. A second novel, Volume Two, is close to completion (this time turning to the war in the Far East) and various other works set in the same world are also in development.

AW: When Ben first approached me with the idea of co-writing a collection of war/horror stories, agreeing to it was one of the easiest decisions I’d ever had to make. It’s not like we hadn’t worked together before, having already produced two volumes of our horror western novellas series Dark Frontiers so it was a real no-brainer. I set to work thinking of some ideas and had a couple lined up when Ben contacted me again and suggested that we based the stores around a secret organisation he’d thought up, there to investigate and combat occult and supernatural forces…

Cool, I thought, putting my kaiju and ghost stories back on the shelf, that’s a really good idea – and began plotting some new stories. I think we ‘d finished a story each when he came up with the “Let’s make this a novel with an overarching narrative” idea. Thus the Damocles Files were born.

I have to say, I’ve never enjoyed writing something as much as I have The Damocles Files. Once we had the main narrative in place, we could tailor the new stories to fit and retrofit the ones we’d already completed. On the whole, we would write individual stories on our own but one of the stories in the book is a collaboration, as is the novella Last Rites which makes up the novel’s conclusion. It’ll be interesting to see whether readers can tell which of us wrote which story – and whether they can tell which was the co-written one.

Part of the joy of writing these stories was spending time with the characters we’d created. I think Ben is a master at this particular art but it’s something I’m not always that confident about so it was good to be able to take his creations and use them in the stories I was working on. It’s no real spoiler to say that not all of them survive until the end credits and it was actually quite emotional writing the scenes where they meet their fates. Of course, a huge benefit of writing the novel as a fractured narrative spanning many years is that there are big gaps between the stories, gaps which are there to be filled, so characters who might not have made it to the end of Volume One can always be resurrected – which is precisely what we’re doing in Volume Two, and all the standalone stories and novellas we have planned.

Whilst the novel is grounded in reality and historical fact, a huge influence on it personally were the war films I watched as a kid (and continue to watch and enjoy, it has to be said). I’ve a huge affection for those films and the unironic way they portrayed the heroism and valour of their heroes. I’d like to think that that gung-ho spirit is reflected in The Damocles Files; there’s certainly plenty of unapologetic heroic sacrifice and bravery above and beyond the call of duty featured within its pages. It’s a love letter to those films of my youth.

I had a great time writing this book and will be forever grateful to Ben for inviting me along for the ride. I hope everyone gets as much enjoyment from reading it as I had in writing it.

Wings in the Darkness was released on Kindle on the 21^st May 2021 and can be purchased here.

The Damocles Files Volume 1: Raganarok Rising is being released in paperback and ebook on 
23^rd July 2021 and the Kindle edition can be pre-ordered here.

The Screaming Dead, by Peter Mark May & Richard Farren Barber

As their new novel, The Screaming Dead, is launched, I hand over the blog to a guest post with a difference from my old partners-in-crime Richard Farren Barber and Peter Mark May.

In the afterlife, the loudest sound is the screaming of the dead.

Death isn’t always the end or the answer. Sam thought his suicide would be the end of his suffering, but he was wrong, as he wakes up in a never-ending graveyard. He soon realises he has an opportunity to be reunited with his departed twin brother, Paul. Yet they must cross through the many planes of the afterlife to find each other. They will need to escape the hordes of the dead, survive forests where burning corpses are nailed to trees, and navigate the feuds and machinations of the people who promise to help them along the way.

Can Sam and Paul find each other in hell, or will the afterlife claim another two souls?

This discussion between Richard Farren Barber and Peter Mark May was recorded on Thursday 11th February 2021 in a Covid-secure manner and without their knowledge.

RFB: You still have the negatives? I assume the deal is we hand them over to Mark once he’s posted a glowing review of The Screaming Dead on his blog, and not a moment earlier?

PMM: They’re in the safe, only accessible with both our retina scans.

RFB: Pete, if Mark asks, what first attracted you to the prospect of working with handsome, charming, witty, stellar author Richard Farren Barber?

PMM: Stevie King kept snubbing my emails. 

RFB: I’ve warned you not to call him Stevie, he doesn’t like that! And I bet he drank that beer in the fridge. Anyway, I’m glad he turned you down. You came up with the initial idea for the novel, and I loved the outline you sent to me. How did you feel about sharing your idea? And how do you cope when your co-writer takes the story off into a different direction to the way you may initially have intended?

Thanks to the pandemic, the last opportunity we had to get together was in Bedford,
on November 30th 2019.  We've chatted online since but it's not the same as meeting
up, scouring secondhand bookshops and having a pizza together.  I miss these two...

PMM: As the owner of Hersham Horror Books, I’m used to sharing good ideas for others to write and run with. With you taking the story off in different directions, it was a challenge in a good way. Trying to steer it the long way back to my ideas, sometimes going in a fresh direction, or simply reinventing large part of the plot, was a great writing challenge.  How did you find the process of writing alternative chapters of approximately 1000 words? Did you write ahead only to be foiled by my next off-kilter chapter and dramatic story direction changes?

RFB: Yes I did! (I can laugh now, but at the time I cursed you. It seemed almost intentional!) But I learned from my mistakes. I would often finish writing a scene and send the file back to you, but by then I was in the zone and I’d carry on writing into the next scene for my set of characters… only to get the document back and discover you’d thrown me a curveball. A few times I could re-use what I’d written, but sometimes I had to stop and rethink where we were going after I got your response. I suppose that is what comes of writing together for the first time. What would you say are the attractions and challenges with collaborative writing when compared to writing alone?

PMM: Doing half the work to write a full book appealed. The challenges were, waiting for the next chapter and finding out either my ideas or the plot you had in mind had to alter or be thrown out the window totally. I enjoyed the dire cliff-hangers I left you with at the end of most of my chapters. Thinking, ‘how is he going to get out of this’ like some old black and white Flash Gordon serial, but you batted them back well. Did any stump you at all?

RFB: Hopefully not, but maybe we’ll get an irate email from a very Cock-a-Doodie reader telling us we cheated because he didn’t get out of the car. (To be fair, and hopefully not giving away too much of a spoiler given that it’s clear from the blurb that if the character in front of you isn’t dead, they will be soon…. We sorted that particular issue by making sure no one gets out of any car alive!)

At Edge-Lit 6, Derby, July 2017 with my collection.
I wrote a report about the Con here.

PMM: What was your favourite chapter to write, any chill you?

RFB: I loved the scenes in the graveyard when the horde churns around and around as a new arrival enters the afterlife. But the one which affected me the most was one you came up with of the dead forest and… well, let’s not give too much away about what happens in there! How about you, do you have any particular favourite scenes from the book? 

PMM: The sky-train of death (no spoilers) was a vivid image I had in my head when writing certain chapters. The chains, death shadow, blood and cow-catcher all unnerved me. That and a certain scene with the baby.

RFB: Oh yes, that scene!

PMM: The story is all about death and the afterlife. Did it stir up personal views, or beliefs in what happens after we die? Did they influence the plot at all?

RFB: Hmm, good question! I don’t recall any particularly strong responses to the storyline in terms of life-after death. I do remember that for me one of the strongest emotions came from the idea of the brothers being separated and that filial urge to get back together. But I do think one of the strengths of horror fiction is the ability to pose the big questions: What is the point of life? Is there anything after this world? I don’t have any answers, but I’m fascinated by exploring the possibilities.

PMM: How does it feel to have something you have writing, turned into audio? 

RFB: It’s a very weird experience! I suppose in some ways it is not dissimilar to producing a script and then handing it over to a team to manage. During the writing process I have a clear idea of what the characters sound like, and so it’s fascinating for someone else to pick that up and give their own interpretation.

We’d better stop now, before someone finds us. Can you send Mark a couple of the images…. Just to keep him focussed! And remind him The Screaming Dead is available in paperback, eBook, and Audiobook.

* * *

Richard Farren Barber was born in Nottingham in July 1970. After studying in London he returned to the East Midlands. He lives with his wife and son and works as a manager for a local university.

 
He has over 80 short stories in publications including: Alt-Dead, Alt-Zombie, DarkFuse, ePocalypse – Tales from the End, Fever Dreams, Horror D’Oeuvres, Murky Depths, Midnight Echo, Midnight Street, Morpheus Tales,  Night Terrors II, Siblings, The House of Horror, Trembles, When Red Snow Melts, and broadcast on Tales to Terrify, Pseudopod, and The Wicked Library.
 
Richard has six novellas published: The Power of Nothing, The Sleeping Dead, Odette, Perfect Darkness, Perfect Silence, Closer Still (which I wrote about here), and All Hell.  His debut novel The Living and the Lost was published in 2019.

Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
His website can be found here www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk

Peter Mark May is the author of nine horror novels and one novella Demon, Kumiho, Inheritance (written as P. M. May), Dark Waters (novella), Hedge End, AZ: Anno Zombie, Something More Than Night, Forky’s House, The End of All Flesh Book 1: The Flood in 2019 and The End of All Flesh: Book 2: The Red Death in 2020. 

He’s had short stories published in genre Canadian & US magazines and UK & US horror anthologies such as Creature Feature, Watch, the British Fantasy Society’s 40th Anniversary anthology Full Fathom Forty, Alt-Zombie, Fogbound From 5, Nightfalls, Demons & Devilry, Miseria’s Chorale, The Bestiarum Vocabulum, Phobophobias, Kneeling in the Silver Light, Demonology and Tales From the Lake Volume 5.

He also writes historical crime under the name Alexander Arrowsmith, his first two a series of novels - The Athens Atrocities and The Medousa Murders - published in 2019.

He also runs Hersham Horror Books and has published 30 books so far. 

His website can be found here http://petermarkmay.weebly.com/

I Spit Myself Out, by Tracy Fahey

To mark the publication of her next collection, I Spit Myself Out, here's a guest post from my friend Tracy Fahey

Eighteen unsettling narratives map the female experience from puberty to menopause.

I Spit Myself Out is a collection of female-voiced stories exploring the terror that lurks beneath the surface of the skin. In this collection, an Anatomical Venus opens to display her organs, clients of a mysterious clinic disappear one by one, a police investigation reveals family secrets, revenge is inked in the skin, and bodies pulsate in the throes of illness, childbirth and religious ritual.

Disturbing and provoking in equal turns, I Spit Myself Out reinvents the body as a breeding ground of terrors that resurface inexorably in the present.

This February 13^th, my collection, I Spit Myself Out, is born. It’s a weird, hybrid selection of stories that respond to the themes of body-based terror and the female experience. It’s influenced by autoethnography, by female rituals of blood from puberty to menopause. But a large part of its conception lies in my abiding love for morbid anatomy, a history that goes back decades.

I grew up in superstitious, Catholic, rural Ireland, with its syncretic blend of Christian and pagan heritage. There, church rituals centred around blood and sacrifice; tales of miraculous relics, of supernatural cures and the potency of saints’ bodies. Irish people are bizarrely comfortable with the spectacle of dead bodies; coffins are routinely uncovered and exposed, the better to stand and talk around at traditional wakes, as in the story, ‘The Girl Who Kissed The Dead.’ As a child I was familiar with the miraculous properties of saints’ bodies; in the cathedral in nearby Drogheda I saw the decapitated, burned head of Blessed Oliver Plunkett, a saint who became both a symbol of colonial resistance and of Catholic martyrdom. Down the road from me in Faughurt was St. Brigid’s stone which boasted a hole burned into it by the eye she plucked out. In this collection, ‘I Kiss The Wounds’ is possibly the most overtly Catholics of these stories, centring on the cult of Padre Pio (an Italian saint from Puglia adopted by Irish Catholics) which celebrated his heavenly stigmata, his sacred wounds. The Cure’ is a testimony to the dying tradition of the holy cures passed from generation to generation.‘Noli Me Tangere’ reflects a childhood of churches, staring at the stained glass windows depicting sun-dazzled scenes from the life of Christ, while ‘Reducing’ speaks to the powerful belief in St. Anthony (yet another adopted Italian saint) beloved of older Irish people as a finder of what is lost. Later in life, I returned to this early obsession with visits to foreign catacombs; tangled and wondrous architectures of monastic bones, jewel-encrusted bodies of saints, preserved in all their glittering magnificence.

This fascination with morbid anatomy also stems from a short-lived stint I spent working in a museum of pathology in Dublin. This was a cornucopia of diseased limbs, lovingly rendered in linen and wax by 19^th century artists for their medical peers to study. Within the murky waters of the glass jars drifted strange and terrifying facsimiles of legs, arms, organs, foetuses; identifiable but  completely other. This fascination led to my discovery of wax creations the Anatomical Venus and her sisters, the Slashed Beauty and the Dissected Graces – all moulded in the same spirit, to probe the boundaries of anatomy. From this obsession, the opening story of the collection unfolded, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ an exploration, step-by-step, into the secret recesses of the female body. Likewise, the closing story of chimeras, ‘I Spit Myself Out,’ is a dark reflection of those yellowed jars of strange specimens in that long-ago museum of pathology.

Morbid pathology also interests me as part my own experience of chronic illness; an apprenticeship of living in an abnormal body that is perpetually straining to conform to normal standards of health. ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Love Like Blood’ both explore what it means to live in a Gothic body, forever in flux, forever fighting mortality.

And so in this collection, I draw together these myriad influences—mystical Catholicism, strange anatomy and chronic illness—to present the reader with recurrent motifs within this collection, signposts to my own strange obsession with the body and all its secrets...

You can pre-order the collection here, or you can order directly from the Sinister Horror Company here.

Tracy Fahey is an Irish writer of Gothic fiction.  

In 2017, her debut collection The Unheimlich Manoeuvre was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Her short fiction is published in over thirty American, British, Australian and Irish anthologies. She holds a PhD on the Gothic in visual arts, and her non-fiction writing is published in edited collections and journals. She has been awarded residencies in Ireland and Greece.

Her first novel, The Girl In The Fort, was published in 2017 by Fox Spirit Press while her second collection, New Music For Old Rituals was released in 2018 by Black Shuck Books.  Her mini-collection, Unheimlich Manoeuvres In The Dark, was published in 2020 by Sinister Horror Company. 

Her new collection, I Spit Myself Out is published by the Sinister Horror Company in February 2021

Tracy can be found online here.

A Wing And A Prayer, by M W Arnold

To mark the publication of his new novel, A Wing And A Prayer, my friend Mick Arnold contributes this guest blog about the origins of his book.

The Air Transport Auxiliary Mystery Club!

Four ladies of the Air Transport Auxiliary bond over solving the mystery of who was responsible for the death of one’s sister. Battling both internal forces and those of the country’s mutual enemies, the women find that both love and dangers are cousins cut from the same ilk.

This is a sweeping story of love, death and betrayal set against the backdrop of war when ties of friendship are exceptionally strong.

Exclusive Extract:

“Mind the duck!”

Mary’s warning was a smidgeon too late. Betty turned her head toward the shout just when she needed to do the exact opposite and keep her eyes on the path. 

“Aargh!” cried Betty as she was sent sprawling to the ground. 

A loud, angry, “Quack! Quack!” was followed by a flurry of wings and feathers as the slightly stunned duck half flew and half staggered to the sanctuary provided by the river. 

“I did tell her to watch out for the duck,” Mary muttered in her own defense as they rushed to help Betty to her feet. 

Penny and Doris took an arm each as Mary reached to retrieve Betty’s handbag. It had landed precariously close to the edge of the river, and the dastardly duck was snuffling at it before Mary seized it and handed it back to Betty. 

“Mary!” cried Betty. “Grab that envelope!” 

Swiveling, Mary saw a large brown envelope and stooped for it before it could fall into the water. “Got it!” she yelled, waving it in the air. Unfortunately, the envelope being upside down, the contents spilled onto the ground around her, luckily missing going into the river. She bent down to pick them up and was surprised to discover they were all newspaper cuttings. 

Hands up who’s heard someone say, I could write a book…only I don’t have the time. I always want to shout at them. Well, make the time!

My new book, A Wing and a Prayer isn’t one of those. Saying this, I also have to say, it wasn’t planned. At no point in my relatively short writing life had I ever planned to write in this genre. I thought I’d be writing, or attempting to write, Women’s Fiction/Romances. Next thing I know, I’ve written a World War 2 Historical Saga –actually, as I write this, book 2 is with my publishers and book 3 is a quarter done – and received a publishing deal. Isn’t life strange?

So, how did it come about? Well, after The Season for Love my body decided the best thing it could do would be to ‘break’ for the best part of two years. At times like this, you discover who your friends are. One of them gave me some very good advice. Don’t try and pick up something you’d been working on, try something new. By going for an unrelated project, I should find myself somewhere I hadn’t been. Somewhat to my surprise, it seems to have worked.

I’ve always loved history, specifically anything to do with flying. As it happened, the same day this was suggested to me, I saw a program called The Spitfire Girls and that sparked the idea that perhaps I could come up with a story set in the Air Transport Auxiliary. A day or so of trawling the internet and the next thing I knew, I had actually planned out about 50% of the first story. I hadn’t set out to write a mystery, yet the girls seemed to migrate towards that thread of their own accord and the rest of the story – how four girls (men, of course, also served in the ATA in much larger numbers) from different walks of life came to live and work together – wrote itself around this thread. Indeed, the first scene in the story finds one of the girl’s sisters being found dead in the cockpit of a Tiger Moth biplane! So, the Air Transport Auxiliary Mystery Club was born.

I served for over sixteen years in the Royal Air Force, travelling all over the world and, of course, the United Kingdom. Some of the bases I served on were once visited by these brave people I've written about and I feel honoured to play a small part in keeping their story alive and in, perhaps, bringing it to a new audience. Their bravery needs to be heard about and with this story, the first in the ‘Broken Wings’ series, I hope to be able to perform this task I've set myself.

Author Bio – 
Mick is a hopeless romantic who was born in England and spent fifteen years roaming around the world in the pay of HM Queen Elisabeth II in the Royal Air Force before putting down roots and realizing how much he missed the travel. This he’s replaced somewhat with his writing, including reviewing books and supporting fellow saga and romance authors in promoting their novels.

He’s the proud keeper of two Romanian Were-Cats, is mad on the music of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and enjoys the theatre and loving his Manchester-United-supporting wife.  A full member of the Romantic Novelists Association, A Wing and a Prayer will be Mick's second published novel, and he is very proud to be welcomed into The Rose Garden.

Social media links:

https://www.facebook.com/MWArnoldAuthor

Twitter – mick859

Instagram – mick859

Author Self-Coaching (part 2): What Happened Next, by Sue Moorcroft

Following up from her guest post a fortnight ago (which you can read here), I'm more than happy to hand the blog over to Sue Moorcroft once again.

Sue & I at her evening event hosted by Rothwell Library in November 2019 - I wrote about it here

A couple of people have asked what happened after I struggled past the crossroads in my writing career (as I wrote about before) where I felt I was spending too much time on things that didn’t make me happy or earn money. To catch you up: I sent what I thought was a hopelessly optimistic email to Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann Literary, TV and Screen Agency, who introduced me to the fab Juliet Pickering of the same agency. Juliet had an eye out for an author of commercial fiction. I won’t pretend that you don’t need these strokes of good fortune.

I met Juliet in London for lunch and we got on well. I was transparent about what I wanted, which was a publisher who would get behind me and get my books into supermarkets. She was equally transparent that that was her job but she couldn’t issue any guarantees. She asked about ideas for future books and I gave her three. She told me which she’d feel most confident in presenting to publishers and I had that happy feeling you get when something clicks into place. It was the one I most wanted to write. It was an idea that I’d already received a green light on from my old publisher, but they’d wanted a novella. I thought the idea had enough meat for a novel.

Disappointingly, Juliet didn’t agree to represent me. She asked me to write the book first. The snag with that was by the time I’d spent a year on the book my old publisher would be expecting it. It would be … awkward. I asked if I could send Juliet the traditional three-chapters and outline instead. Would she make a decision at that point? She agreed. She told me later she’d already made up her mind to offer to represent me but wanted to go through the process in the right way.

Takeaways from this meeting: honesty and transparency on both sides. Accepting the commercial realities of publishing. Listening to what was on offer. Putting forward alternatives. Taking disappointment on the chin because, let’s face it, a writer’s life is full of it.

Sue's Avon Books output

Telling my old publishers that I was working with an agent effectively changed our relationship because they didn’t work with agents. They would continue to publish my backlist; inevitably, they’d concentrate on their front list authors.

I wrote the first few chapters of what became The Christmas Promise. I roughed out a few other things I thought would happen - more of a vision than an outline. Juliet offered to represent me and formalities were quickly concluded. Delighted, all I had to do was write the rest of the book, continuing to write short stories and run workshops for income to add to royalties from backlist titles. A note here: relaunching my career eventuated in a distinct dip in income for about two years. To have a spouse with a steady income and supportive attitude helped a lot. I also got the opportunity to convert my writing guide, Love Writing, into an online course. That helped too.

After I sent the novel to Juliet, the editing process began. And it was rigorous. I think I did three structural edits, influenced by comments from other people in the agency who read the book too. For anyone who thinks of editing as someone interfering or instructing, I should point out that a process like this is something likely to happen to any book in any publishing house. I think of this as writing the best book I can. I listen. I negotiate. I talk through.

Takeaways from this process: this is not for wimps. It feels like a lot of structural work yet, in the end, the changes are fairly subtle. The book is a lot better. I probably didn’t known as much as I thought I did. My agent is on my side.

When the book went out to editors we got a lot of interest, only one flat ‘no’ and some meetings to go to. As an aside, just to let you know how character building the process was, some major interest led nowhere because the editor was going on maternity leave and guess who was coming from another publishing house to cover? The one person who’d given the flat ‘no’. But I wouldn’t want an editor who wasn’t wowed by my writing, so I was philosophical.

The exciting day dawned and I turned up in London for meetings. The first was with Avon Books UK, HarperCollins. Once again, everything clicked. We got on well, we shared similar visions. Another stroke of good fortune: a slot for an author who would write a winter book and a summer book had opened up on their list, just as my agent rocked up with a winter book and a summer book! The winter book was ready and the summer book not so that played into there being a longer dip in income than might otherwise have been the case but still, outside I said to my agent, ‘I think it’s going to be Avon.’ I never wavered from that and Juliet got down to terms with them for a two-book contract.

The Christmas Promise went into production. I finished writing Just for the Holidays.  The Christmas Promise came out. Supermarkets took the paperback, although Tesco was a little late to the party and only took it for the last couple of weeks before Christmas because of the performance of the ebook.

The ebook was going crazy. It went to number one on Kindle UK for five days in the run-up to Christmas 2016. I’d sold my first short story to a national newsstand magazine in 1996 so it had taken me twenty years to be an overnight success! It’s hard to describe the joy and euphoria, the sense of disbelief. I laughed and cried. Twitter went mad with big-hearted compliments from other authors, from my agent and editor jumping in with their own cries of joy. My book had outsold every other ebook on sale in the UK. I had to pinch myself.

I won’t take you through every other rung on the ladder because I have edits to do but the milestones continue. Just for the Holidays was nominated for a Romantic Novel Award. A new contract was offered and my editor stated her next goal as to make me a Sunday Times bestseller. I laughed out loud and said, ‘Well, good luck with that!’ The very next book, The Little Village Christmas, was a Sunday Times bestseller. The Christmas Promise was a bestseller in Germany. The rights team at Blake Friedmann sold my books into translation. Each book charted in the Top Fifty, if not the Top Twenty. Avon extended the scope of my contract to include Canada and the US. A Summer to Remember won the Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award 2020 and One Summer in Italy scored me my first Top 100 position in the Amazon Kindle US chart. Research has taken me to France, Italy, Malta, Sweden and Switzerland.

It’s A LOT of hard work, not just from me but from everyone at Blake Friedmann and Avon, but it’s wonderful. I set out to earn my living from writing novels and I do. Summer on a Sunny Island is my eighth book with Avon and A Christmas Wish will come out later this year. A further two books are contracted.

Takeaways: work hard … and work with the right people.


Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times and international bestselling author and has reached the coveted #1 spot on Amazon Kindle. She’s won the Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award, Readers’ Best Romantic Novel award and the Katie Fforde Bursary. Sue’s novels of love and life are currently released by publishing giant HarperCollins under the Avon imprint in the UK, US and Canada and by an array of publishers in other countries.

Her short stories, serials, columns, writing ‘how to’ and courses have appeared around the world.

Born into an army family in Germany, Sue spent much of her childhood in Cyprus and Malta. An avid reader, she also loves Formula 1, travel, time spent with friends, dance exercise and yoga.

Buying links for Summer on a Sunny Island

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/summer-on-a-sunny-island

Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/summer-on-a-sunny-island/id1482741071

Paperback: https://www.waterstones.com/book/summer-on-a-sunny-island/sue-moorcroft/9780008321826

Audio: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Summer-on-a-Sunny-Island/dp/B084YV1SX8

Website: www.suemoorcroft.com
Blog: https://suemoorcroft.wordpress.com/ 
Facebook: sue.moorcroft.3
Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/SueMoorcroftAuthor
Twitter: @suemoorcroft
Instagram: suemoorcroftauthor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suemoorcroft
Amazon author page: Author.to/SueMoorcroft

Author Self-Coaching (guest post), by Sue Moorcroft

To mark the forthcoming publication of her latest novel, Summer on a Sunny Island, here's a guest post from my fine friend Sue Moorcroft.

In Summer on a Sunny Island, to be published on 30 April 2020, several of the characters stand at crossroads in their lives. From a writing point of view it provides conflict and personal goals, both of which drive the narrative. One afternoon, Rosa and Zach sit up on the roof terrace and try to coach each other into deciding what it is they want next in their lives. It’s not a spectacularly successful coaching session because although they agree they should be looking forward they look back. They wonder whether they should change and, if so, how?

A few years ago I felt at a crossroads too. I wasn’t on a Maltese roof terrace gazing out at the blue Mediterranean and drinking beer with a friend so I coached myself. It had a profound effect on my career as an author.

I’d published about nine novels and a raft of short stories, serials, courses and columns; I was a creative writing tutor and judged writing competitions. It was what’s politely referred to as ‘a portfolio career’. Translation: I would take on most paid tasks if they were connected with writing and some that were unpaid if they might prove useful to my career. This situation had come about after my husband’s career hit a bump in the road and I either had to become more fee aware or get a day job. (I often refer to this as ‘a proper job’. I shouldn’t. Writing is a proper job.)

I wasn’t in a happy place personally and felt over-stressed and underpaid. You could term it a crisis of the spirit or a pity party. Whatever, I assessed everything writing-connected under three headings, each subdivided into good or bad.

I can’t remember all the items I analysed but two things went into all three right-hand columns: being a committee member and vice chair of a writing organisation and writing a column for a Formula 1 online magazine. I was shocked to see the former in all the wrong columns but it was true that an organisation that has brought me a lot of joy and helped me professionally was also sucking up hundreds of hours each year. There was also discord, which brought anxiety. I emailed the chair, who’s one of my best friends, and said, ‘I don’t think I can be vice chair any more.’ To her huge credit, she supported my decision and had me replaced without one word of reproach, though she could easily have felt immensely let down. After that, it was comparatively easy to email the e-zine and gracefully retire from their writing staff.

I felt tonnes lighter when these two items were out of the way. I could read what I chose instead of reading writing that needed appraising for awards! I could watch Formula 1 races without making notes or worrying about the angle my column would take! I think my son encapsulated the situation perfectly when he said, ‘You took two of your greatest pleasures and made them into jobs.’

Spurred by this success I began to cut things that appeared in two of the right-hand columns. They earned me some money but not that much: appraising manuscripts and the least remunerative of my work with creative writing students. The students never made me personally unhappy but the constant flow of work that piled up if I were ill or on holiday did definitely cheese me off. Worse, it kept me from writing my own stuff and the workflow was not within my control. I also began to refuse invitations to judge writing competitions, especially when a writing group ‘forgot’ to pay me a fee that was only ever nominal, even after three polite reminders. These measures gave me significant time for my own writing without losing me much money.

Feeling a lot better, I looked at the other side of the coin. I now knew what I didn’t want - so what was it that I did want?

It was a question I found easier to answer than either Rosa or Zach did. It hadn’t really changed since the early nineties when I began to try and get published.

I wanted to earn a living from writing novels.

How could I achieve it? I needed a publisher who would get right behind me and also get my books into supermarkets.

I thought the best route there was to get a great agent, one who would love my books and be ambitious for me. And, guess what? It worked!

I emailed the late Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann. I knew her slightly from writing conferences and social media. The email began, ‘I know you’re not taking anybody on but I’m going to ask you anyway.’ The short version of what happened next was that I was right - she wasn’t taking anybody on. But, happily for me, she showed my work to the wonderful Juliet Pickering at the same agency and she wanted to talk to me. We met, got on, shared visions … she was enthusiastic about my books. We began working together.

The rest, as annoying people say, is history. My self-coaching didn’t end as Rosa’s and Zach’s did, in a hot clinch interrupted by her ex-boyfriend FaceTiming her, but the results were - and still are - pretty exciting.

You can read the second part, "What Happened Next", here

A selfie from Sue, in her beloved Malta

Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times and international bestselling author and has reached the coveted #1 spot on Amazon Kindle. She’s won the Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award, Readers’ Best Romantic Novel award and the Katie Fforde Bursary. Sue’s novels of love and life are currently released by publishing giant HarperCollins under the Avon imprint in the UK, US and Canada and by an array of publishers in other countries.

Her short stories, serials, columns, writing ‘how to’ and courses have appeared around the world.

Born into an army family in Germany, Sue spent much of her childhood in Cyprus and Malta. An avid reader, she also loves Formula 1, travel, time spent with friends, dance exercise and yoga.

Buying links for Summer on a Sunny Island

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/summer-on-a-sunny-island

Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/summer-on-a-sunny-island/id1482741071

Paperback: https://www.waterstones.com/book/summer-on-a-sunny-island/sue-moorcroft/9780008321826

Audio: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Summer-on-a-Sunny-Island/dp/B084YV1SX8

Website: www.suemoorcroft.com
Blog: https://suemoorcroft.wordpress.com/ 
Facebook: sue.moorcroft.3
Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/SueMoorcroftAuthor
Twitter: @suemoorcroft
Instagram: suemoorcroftauthor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suemoorcroft
Amazon author page: Author.to/SueMoorcroft

Becoming a Hybrid Author, a guest post by Jane Isaac

To mark the publication of her latest novel, After He's Gone, here's a guest post from my friend Jane Isaac.

Thank you so much for inviting me onto your blog, Mark! This marks the publication of not only a new book for me, but also the start of a new crime series and a slight change of course in my publishing journey.

Those who’ve read my previous work will know that I currently write the DCI Helen Lavery series and the DI Will Jackman series, both published by Legend Press. While I will still be working with Legend on my backlist, as well as possibly more titles in future, I decided to dip my toe in the water of self-publishing this year to see if I could follow the process myself and become a hybrid author (a term used for those who mix traditional and self-publishing, although it conjures up pictures of roses and horticulture more than books to me!). For that purpose, I wrote a new crime series introducing Family Liaison Officer, DC Beth Chamberlain.

It can be a difficult decision to change series, especially when readers have invested so much in your characters, but I see it more as a break. I’d love to work with both Helen and Will again in the future, but wanted to try something different for the moment, to keep the stories fresh.

This new series has been an interesting one to research and write as it offers a different perspective on murder investigations, focusing on and around the victim’s family. Family Liaison Officers are deployed to support families of victims of serious crime like homicide, road death and other critical incidents. They spend a lot of time updating them on the investigation and feeding back information and often get very close. And since most people are killed by someone they know or someone close to them, it affords the opportunity to unravel some really intriguing secrets!

Self-publishing has certainly presented a huge learning curve – now I really know what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing world! I followed the same process I’ve been through many a time in traditional publishing, but this time I had to hire my own help along the way. Like many self-published authors, I spent a long time choosing the right structural editor, copy editor, proofer and formatter for my book so that the end product was a quality piece of work. I also had great fun working directly with the cover artists!

For me, it seems it’s all about the team you have around you and the timetabling. As long as you source good recommended people to work with and stick to a rigid timetable it seems that everything falls into place. I’m not saying there weren’t any nail-biting or pulling-your-hair-out moments, because there definitely were(!), but it’s like learning anything new – you have to do the training. I think next time I embark on a self-published title I will feel certainly feel more experienced and more organised, although I’m the first to admit that I still have a lot to learn.

I’ve just completed the first draft of the second DC Beth Chamberlain novel which is scheduled for release at the end of this year. One of the joys of writing a series is that, by the end of the first book, you know the character implicitly and it’s wonderful to challenge and stretch them in other directions. Plus, I get the chance to follow my self-publishing journey again as I start to prepare it for release. Watch this space there!

‘The safety catch on the Glock snapped as it was released. Her stomach curdled as she watched the face of death stretch and curve. Listened to the words drip from his mouth, ‘Right. Let’s begin, shall we?’ 

You think you know him. Until he’s dead.

When Cameron Swift is gunned down outside his family home, DC Beth Chamberlain is appointed Family Liaison Officer: a dual role that requires her to support the family, and also investigate them. 

As the case unfolds and the body count climbs, Beth discovers that nothing is quite as it appears and everyone, it seems, has secrets. 

Even the dead…

If you'd like to know more about Jane, you can read an interview I conducted with her on the blog here.

Jane Isaac lives with her detective husband (very helpful for research!) and her daughter in rural Northamptonshire, UK where she can often be found trudging over the fields with her Labrador, Bollo. Her debut, An Unfamiliar Murder, was nominated as best mystery in the 'eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook awards 2013.' The follow up, The Truth Will Out, was nominated as ‘Thriller of the Month – April 2014’ by E-Thriller.com.

After He’s Gone is Jane’s sixth novel and the first in a new series featuring Family Liaison Officer, DC Beth Chamberlain. The second DC Beth Chamberlain novel will be released later in 2018.

Connect with Jane at www.janeisaac.co.uk