Next...

Two bits of news I'm happy to share. The first is that The Lucifer Chord has been sold to a very reputable publisher, bought by an editor I've worked with productively in the past. I don't know when it's scheduled for release, but will inform those of you interested both here and on my F. G. Cottam Facebook page just as soon as I do.

This novel is the first stand-alone title featuring my character Ruthie Gillespie as its main protagonist. Chronologically it takes place almost three years after the events recounted in The Going and the Rise and reunites her with the architect Michael Aldridge, who featured prominently in that story. It is set predominantly in London a few weeks after Ruthie's ordeal on New Hope Island recounted in Harvest of Scorn. It isn't necessary to have read any of my fiction to appreciate what's going on in the pages of this one, it's just that my characters can't exist in some sort of fictive vacuum. They have lives and back-stories and I believe strongly in continuity and naturalistic scenarios. Thus I take note of chronology.

The other news is that I've begun a prequel, set in 1983 and concerning my Colony trilogy Met Police veteran Commander Patrick Lassiter. Except of course he isn't a veteran here. He's a sharp-minded and ambitious young Detective-Constable based in Camden Town, where over a sultry summer month, he investigates a suspicious death. The victim is a spirit medium, apparently a harmless eccentric with no known enemies. But nothing, let's be honest, is ever quite as it seems.

In the period in which the novel is set, I was a local reporter writing mostly about crime in the borough of Camden. Operating out of an office on Kentish Town Road, I'd pay twice-weekly visits to the police stations in Kentish Town and Holborn, where they'd open up the crime books and take me through any serious investigations requiring the public be warned - or asked for help. So no research necessary for this one and the memories have come flooding back. Bananarama on the transistor radio, when it wasn't Culture Club. Aiming to finish this full-length novel by my birthday at the end of January. Birthdays bring only a sort of reflective gloom at my age, so as a gift from me to me, the new book will be a sort of consolation prize.