September 2026

Dear Reader,

I hope the summer has been kind to you and yours, though I write knowing that, for some of you at least, it may not have been. If so, I can only send my sympathies, and the hope that the days are being gentle with you in the aftermath.

As I prepare to leave for some promotional work in Chile and Argentina — please, don’t feel sorry for me, it’ll just make things harder — I thought I might update you on progress over the summer, and what you can expect in the months to come, even into next year.

THE CASTLE, of which more below, has now been copyedited and, in the UK at least, proofed, and is now pretty much ready for publication in May 2027.

SHADOW VOICES: 300 Years of Irish Genre Fiction, first published in 2021, has been given a small, gentle polish, in part to clarify one or two details, make a small correction here and there, and finally, to put the section dealing with the late Ken Bruen into the past tense, as Ken has since gone to his reward. It seemed somehow disrespectful not to go to the trouble of acknowledging his passing.

Finally, the Mysterious Press wanted to republish the Mysterious Profile devoted to Charlie Parker, originally published in 2008. When I reread what I’d written back then, I realized my thinking on some of it had changed, while other parts were simply wrong, since my work on Shadow Voices and my PhD thesis had revealed all that I didn’t know nearly two decades ago. The Profile has therefore been rewritten and expanded, so that what was once 5,500 words is now 11,000. Mysterious Press will release the new edition as an e-book and a printed volume ater this year, and I’m hoping to sign a small quantity of the books in November. We should have preorder information for that book in the next newsletter.

As I write, both Hodder in the UK and Atria in the US are reading the manuscript of a historical novel, set at the end of the fifteenth century, which had been nagging at me for some time. The question, should it be accepted, is when to publish that novel. I really don’t ever want to publish two books in one year again, mostly because it’s actually more like publishing four, since the US and UK have completely different processes for copyediting, proofing, covers, marketing and promotion, all of which eat up a lot of time and energy. That might mean publishing the historical novel in 2028, which would mean a bit of a break between Parker books. (It’s best to publish novels as they’re written, I think, rather than having to return to something a year or two later, after one has moved on from it.)

Anyway, we shall see. At least I’ve tried to keep myself busy, and I hope that some of the results will meet with your approval. More on most of these volumes, and more, below…

THE CASTLE: MAY 2027