Novels

I have always loved the novel form. My first draft of Paler Than Grass was optioned under various working titles by three film production companies, sadly it only reached pre-production stage and languished in the rightly named film development hell! The adaptation took me on a long journey into scriptwriting. In recent years I have returned to writing novels with a slate of contrasting projects.

Black Water
Contemporary folk horror. A grieving artist, Alex, from Manchester is granted a three month sojourn at a lakeside studio in the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland. She learns that the previous artist drowned in the lake; the verdict is open. But could his death have been something altogether more sinister than suicide or murder? Inspired by a young local woman, Aoife, his paintings had become exceptional but also obsessive and disturbing. Could it be that Aoife is the Leanan Sidhe? – a legendary fairy demon who seduces artists and lures them to their death. As Alex becomes entangled in Aoife’s mystery she too begins to unravel. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CTHZG2WG

I have been offered a contract by Sapere Books for the Sheridan Mysteries, a series of historical crime novels featuring the playwright and politician Richard Brinsely Sheridan as the protagonist. Hoping to launch in 2024!

The first in the series, Harlequin is Dead, is set in 1791: As the work of demolition begins, Sheridan discovers the remains of an unidentified performer buried under the cellars of The Theatre Royal Drury Lane. So begins a tale of spies, espionage and assassination plots played out in a society increasingly nervous that the turn of events across the channel in revolutionary France will spread unrest in Britain and Ireland.

The second in the series, Death Casts A Long Shadow, is set in 1792: The blood drenched body of a scene painter is found fatally wounded amongst the canvas.  His dying words to Sheridan, ‘Look after Lucy!’  The painter’s sister is the woman in question and Sheridan is struck by her connection to an earlier murder in his Stafford constituency when, in company with Lord Cannock, he stumbled on the body of the Earl’s cousin, Edward Stretton, a scoundrel and seducer, heavily in debt.

The third in the series, The Thirteenth Apostle, is set in 1793: England is at war with France.  Spies and agents seem everywhere.  Pitt’s Government has become increasingly more repressive.  Reformers like Sheridan must be wary that they are not charged with treason. Other terrors stalk the night streets of London.  There is a killer abroad with very particular targets, Mollies – or sodomites as they are also known.  Each victim marked with an arcane symbol.  When one of his young actors is found murdered in a notorious Covent Garden bagnio Sheridan is drawn into a murky world of hidden lives and secret liaisons.

The Lucky Country
An epic saga set in Australia primarily in the 1960s was published in Spring 2021.  
A family of Irish emigrants, the Glendons, are in search of home and identity.  Their story interwoven with a cast of equally lost souls with whom they eventually collide on the vast wheat and sheep station owned by Jack Anderson, a man as tough and ruthless as his pioneering father.  In the Outback their fates intertwine with Ben Down, an indigenous Australian farm labourer who is as dislocated from his roots as any of immigrants. Stories and memories weave together over the breadth of the twentieth century. 

Hunters Wood
Contemporary psychological suspense.

A Victorian era investigative series, Caminada and Waters Investigate, set in the Manchester of the 1870s is in research and development with the first draft of Book One, Death and the Monkey, nearing completion.

The Return of Josiah Temple. November 1865, the last surrender of the American Civil War takes place when the CSS Shenandoah surrenders in Liverpool, England, hoping to avoid a charge of treason and piracy. The crew and marines are released. Josiah Temple decides to leave his shady past behind and to return home to Manchester. He arrives to find that the wife he abandoned thirty years previously has recently been fished out of the River Irwell under suspicious circumstances. He also discovers that he has a son, Jed. Can Josiah atone for his past, reconcile with Jed and avenge the murder of his wife?

I will also plan to redraft the 1960s coming of age novel, Paler Than Grass and have begun work on The Tumbling, a bizarre contemporary love story inspired by a true story from 8th century Ireland.