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Imagine that a religious community of 150 souls vanished as abruptly and inexplicably from an island in the Hebrides as did the crew of the Marie Celeste. They simply disappeared from the face of the earth one day in the 1850s leaving no trace of themselves behind. The New Hope Island vanishing continues to be one of the enduring enigmas of modern history.
That's until a media magnate decides to arrest the dwindling circulation of his flagship news-stand title by solving the mystery once and for all.
To this end he puts together a disparate team of experts. They include a virologist, a forensic archaeologist, a cosmologist, a psychic, an expert cold-case detective and as a sensationalist afterthought - a priest with first hand experience of demonology.
But all is not right on New Hope Island. We know that from a cine film taken there in the 1930s by a reclusive loner trying to scratch a living as a crofter. Recovered and restored, it shows something disturbing and inexplicable.
We know it too from the experiences of a security guard sent to secure the island for the expedition. His unearthly experiences there have nothing to do with the battle trauma he suffered in his earlier, soldiering career.
This is the setting for my first venture into self-publishing, a novel I will price cheaply as a download only and put out, if all goes to plan, next month.
The novel is called The Colony (the title being, I hope, the least imaginative element of the whole story).
I wrote it to see if I could write something with a larger cast of main characters than I would normally create and with events on a more epic scale. Qualitatively, I don't think it differs in the slightest from the five F.G's preceding it.
I plan to price it at 99p - 99 cents in America. There are books you can download for less. You can download some for free. But I don't believe it's conceited to think that 450 pages of fairly consistent scares is poor value at less than a pound.
There's good and bad aspects to self-publishing, but I'm one author excited by its possibilities.