Month: April 2024

YAP, present draft, 22,600 words.

Looking to the top of this blog entry, it occurs to me that I am not one to shy away from grandiose titling!  Can I justify it?  Well . . .

Last year, as some of you may recall, I attended my first ever crime festival: Shetland Noir in, er, Shetland.  It was a fantastic event, sponsored by the incomparable Anne Cleeves but organized by Shetland-based crime writer, Marsali Taylor.  Her latest, Death at a Shetland Festival, is coming out on May 9.

Marsali and I, together with authors AJ Liddell and Lydia Travers, will be hosting An Afternoon of Crime at the Aberdeen Central Library, Aberdeen, Scotland (not Mississippi) on May 7.  As for world firsts, I will be reading in public from my latest novel, Two Times Murder, for the very first time.  Needless to say, I’m a little nervous about it.  But also excited!

Two Times Murder is a sequel to my first mystery novel, A Quiet Teacher. We are still working on the details but the cover copy will read something like this:

Greg Abimbola is many things. He’s Black, British and fluent in Russian. He’s a snappy dresser, a reasonable teacher, and an unenthusiastic sports fan. But most of all, he’s exceptional at keeping secrets. Like, who he really is, and the things he’s done.

Determined to keep his head down after helping solve a murder in the school basement, Greg fears a trap when Sergeant Rachel Lev of the Pittsburgh police corners him in his apartment. Because his refusal to take credit isn’t modesty, it’s a survival tactic.

But Rachel is here on another matter entirely.  She needs his help. She’s lead detective on the homicide of an unidentified man fished from the Allegheny River.  With clues scant, and surrounded by colleagues who’d love to see her side-lined, Greg is her final roll of the dice.

Greg has no choice.  He knows more than he’s saying about Rachel’s mysterious corpse. To add to his troubles, a school trustee plunges to his demise after a heated board meeting. Both deaths come with potentially lethal consequences.  If he doesn’t find answers, and soon, Greg Abimbola will be the third man in Autopsy.

Looking forward to it!

YAP, present draft: 11,200 words

I would be completely consumed by jealousy today but for an antidote and a distraction.

Consumed because today is a total solar eclipse across a gigantic swathe of the United States.  Everyone, including my agent, the estimable Brady, is off to enjoy it except me.  I’m stuck in Scotland, where our measly ten-percent-or-so partial eclipse will no doubt be obscured by clouds.

What’s really gnawing at me is that I could totally have been in the total eclipse zone if I’d known it was happening ahead of time.  I mean, I did know about it ahead of time, like several months ago, but by then it was already too late: hotels booked up, RV parks jammed: no hope for Johnny-Come-Latelies like yours truly.  Now, watching the coverage on CNN, part of me is thinking that we should have sucked it up and gone along anyway.  The other part, the part that is being swamped beneath a tidal wave of regret right now, remembers the one and only total eclipse I have ever seen: Devon, England in 1999.  I drove down on the day and it was complete chaos: traffic jams like I’ve never seen, a desperate scramble to find somewhere, anywhere, to sit down and watch and then the whole thing was hidden by clouds which, to be fair, didn’t stop the eclipse itself from being awesome.

But the traffic.  That’s what I need to remember.  Getting home was a 170-mile journey.  It took me the best part of twelve hours.  Sadly, I am an irrational human being and it’s not enough.  I remain consumed with regret and envy, the only saving graces being the aforesaid antidote and distraction.

The antidote is this.  There is another total eclipse in 2026, this one running from the Arctic across Greenland, Iceland and, most importantly, the always sunny north of Spain.  Spain is very easy to reach from Scotland and I have already booked my spot.  Yay!  And for those of you who really like to plan ahead, there’s another one in Australia in 2028 . . .

As for the distraction, it is, as usual, writing.  Two Times Murder, as I am learning to call it, is basically done.  There’s copyediting and stuff left to do, of course, but the heavy lifting is over.  Which means it’s time for the next project.  Alternating as I do between mystery and SF, it’s time for SF.  I don’t want to say too much about it because (obvs) it’s not finished.  I will say this, though.  It is a young adult project, called . . .

Hah!  No way.  Having been burned yet again on the naming front, I’m not even going to give it a working title, so there.  We’re going to call it Young Adult Project, or, more appropriately, YAP.  When it comes to titles, I’m on strike.