The Fourth Haunting

That's the title of the novel I completed on October 10. I couldn't write at all in lockdown until August 14 when suddenly I couldn't stop. 91, 000 words, first-person single POV and two time-frames.

Tom Carter endured an experience at the age of 11 that determined his future life. In the present day he's Britain's most celebrated ghost-hunter. He is painfully divorced and the father of a beloved daughter who is a danger to herself. He pitches four allegedly haunted locations to a TV producer as the basis for a series and the producer green-lights the pilot, to be filmed at an abandoned orphanage at the foot of the Italian Dolomites. And away we go.

I think this is the best novel I have written since Dark Echo and the scariest since The House of Lost Souls. Done in under two months, there were times when it felt like it was writing itself. Though I have buffed it up since completion. Or polished it, for those of you unfamiliar with English phraseology. It's also written from a post-pandemic perspective, which seems a bit optimistic. Though I do hope all of you are getting through these uncertain times without them taking too much of a toll.