Book Blog

No Fae Back Now

Who do you call when you find a boy with no face in a magical coma? Well, since government cutbacks mean there’s no occult police division any more, you’re going to end up in the capable* hands of Argana Zeit, amateur paranormal investigator. Sure, she’s flaky, but what she lacks in organisational aptitude she makes up for in attitude and intuition. But when a monster trashes a nearby housing estate and the local entrepreneur spins up his demonic cryptic scam, things are going to get a lot weirder than she and her ghost-sensing dog can imagine. Ah, the Argana Zeit…

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Where is Trotterwell?

With the blatant exception of her hometown of Trotterwell, every location that Argana visits is from the real world. They’re places that I’ve been, and that I love. But you may be less familiar, so I’ve drawn this map to help you out. Although there are more villages and sites of note than shown, this has the broad sweeps. To give you an idea of scale, it’s around 20 miles from Buxton to Bakewell. But the roads are narrow and there's a sheep around every corner, so it takes longer to drive than you'd imagine! Also, I was inspired to…

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Removing the single stories

I’m taking my short stories down off of Amazon. Just the individual ones, they’ll still all be available as collected editions, which represent better value anyway. In theory I’m doing this because I’m concerned that a plethora of short books will confuse new readers. But secretly it’s because it confuses me to have to keep track of them all. That and I changed cover styles several times, and it’s all just messy! It’ll take a little while to sort out, so if you happen to have collected most of them and just have a couple of gaps to fill, now…

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Why Argana Zeit?

I wrote a submarine horror novel. It took three years and genuinely gave me nightmares, which was possibly my first clue that I wasn’t cut out for penning terror. I duly sent it off to agents that I admired, or at least had heard of, and waited for the advances and royalties to roll in. As that wait grew unaccountably longer, I figured I’d write something short, as a bit of a pallet cleanser. I’d been watching Columbo* and really wanted to do something with clues in it. I had this paranormal investigator character from a comic I’d half drawn…

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