And is it about to become a trilogy??

Last Friday I released by 24th book, gritty crime thriller, The Dark Finds You. This book about dark pasts converging in the battle to find a missing teenager, can be read and enjoyed as a standalone, but it also fits into a bigger universe of connected characters and plots. If you’ve read The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, The Holds End Trilogy, The Mess of Me, The Mess of Us, Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature or At Night We Played In The Road, you will find some familiar faces and locations in The Dark Finds You!

The idea for this novel came to me when writing The Mess Of Us and At Night We Played In The Road. Those books already fitted into a connected universe, as At Night We Played In The Road is technically a spin-off from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, and The Mess of Us and Me are set in the same universe and location. These books also had connecting plotlines with drug abuse, drug running, music and community being common themes.

The Holds End trilogy, essentially a murder mystery centred around enigmatic teenage singer, Bill Robinson, also takes place in the same universe and has similar plotlines converging.

This is why The Dark Finds You was so easy to write! All these characters had already converged, their storylines connected and their locations crossed over. The plot of a missing boy was then used to pull them all together and the plan was to end this universe for good. Tie up their individual storylines as well as the missing boy plot. I wrote The Dark Finds You over six weeks back in 2023 and it’s had to wait this long to get its release date. It is now available in ebook and paperback across multiple platforms.

So, what next? Well, in checking The Dark Finds You paperback proof for any errors just before Christmas, I suddenly got some new ideas and a sequel exploded in my head. There were a few things I left open at the end of the book and that crack was enough to let the ideas seep in. I had the whole plot within a day and simply could not resist writing it! Over Christmas I had three weeks off work and the book just poured out of me in a total of four weeks. Of course, that’s a rough first draft and it needs a lot of work!

This week I dived into my second draft of The Dark Finds You – Part Two. This is what I call a read-through draft, (where I remind myself of what I wrote!) and a timeline draft, (where I set out the timeline of events in a notebook to ensure there are no inconsistencies.) This didn’t take long to complete and by the end of it I had some things I wanted to change.

A few minor things to add and embellish and one major thing to change. This means that draft three which starts now, will be a rewrite more than an edit.

And then, guess what happened?

My rewrite ideas, which undoubtedly make the whole novel more twisty and unpredictable, led me to ideas for a possible part three…

Noooooooo!

I was meant to be releasing the Black Hare Valley series this year…

I have delayed that for the moment because it feels right to fully concentrate on this potential trilogy and get it done. I won’t say it will end the universe forever because that’s probably not going to happen, is it? It seems I love this world too much.

I am not 100% certain I will write a part three and make The Dark Finds You a trilogy… but the changes I make to part two will certainly leave that as a possibility.

In the meantime, I have got to crack on with this third draft/rewrite and also not neglect to market the first book!

As usual, thanks for joining me hear in my tiny corner of the internet! Thank you for your support in 2025 and for sticking with me into 2026!