A new book is on the way, and it’s called….

The Caretaker

Okay so, the big, exciting, explosive announcement I’ve been sitting on for a while now. Yes, I have another adult thriller on the way with HarperCollins. Due to my brutal schedule it won’t be out until next year. And, just to rip the band aid off now for everyone who’s been asking since The Inheritance, no, it’s not another Maggie novel.

Still with me? Okay, so just to clarify – yes, Maggie will be back, sooner than you think if not where you expect. But I wanted to try something a bit different for my next adult novel. In The Hunted I played with the tropes of outback horror, in The Inheritance it was neo-noir, but for this I wanted to navigate away from the violence and action and instead try to write something with an absolutely punishing focus on suspense.

The book is called The Caretaker. Like Maggie, the protagonist is a young woman with a dark past. But that’s where the similarities end. Charlotte is awkward, fearful, riddled with doubt, and just wants to be left alone, unlike Maggie who practically jumps at the chance for a fight. Some dangerous people are looking for Charlotte and so she’s taken a job in a miniscule ski resort as an off-season caretaker. She lives up there alone, tending to the lodges, safe in her solitude.

Until a surprise visitor arrives. A visitor who claims to be a writer chasing a bit of peace and quiet. Charlotte is uncomfortable, but the guy seems trustworthy. That is, until strange things start happening around the resort. And Charlotte starts to realise that every escape route she has is being sealed off one by one.

I wanted to do a couple of things with this book. The first was to approach the location of a ski resort from a slightly different angle. Obviously it’s not foreign territory for me, given the setting of The True Colour of a Little White Lie, but True Colour was all about capturing the vibe of a ski resort in the midst of a bustling winter. In The Caretaker I want to look at the other side of the seasonal coin; the grey, washed out, desolate feeling a lot of those places have during the summer and autumn before the snow starts falling. A few years back I went to a friend’s buck’s party on Mt Baw Baw during the summer, and it was a deeply creepy place to be, not least because Baw Baw is a tiny resort and there was no-one else up there. It got me thinking about the idea of a vulnerable, isolated person stuck there as a mysterious and possibly imagined threat bears down on them.

Which leads me to the second thing I wanted to do; write the kind of focused, small cast, cat and mouse psychological thriller that I adore. What’s real and what isn’t, who’s dangerous and who isn’t; all the kinds of questions I can’t wait to play with.

I will leave you with a couple of big clues. Like everything I’ve written post-Boone Shepard, this shares a universe with my other works, and there will be plenty of Easter eggs if you want to look for them. The two stories it’s most closely connected to are my first Audible Original, The Consequence and, funnily enough, my soon-to-be-released second, The Hitchhiker– which, by the way, means it is also linked to The Hunted and the Inheritance, just not as directly. Of course, it’s in every way a standalone book, but there are fun links to be found if you’re into that kind of thing.

The other thing I’ll say is a little vaguer and more frustrating. Which is: just because Maggie won’t appear in the book, doesn’t mean she has no bearing on the plot, or that this story won’t be important to the next time she turns up.

And look, that’s probably enough cryptic nonsense for now, not least because I haven’t actually written the thing yet. But I’m beyond excited to and beyond excited to reunite with the family at HarperCollins to bring you another gnarly, pulpy roller-coaster ride. I hope you enjoy it.

Other Projects

There’s nothing too new to report here, as it’s the same three I’ve been juggling since the start of the year. I’m about to go into the full treatment of Gremoryland, have delivered the final draft of The Hitchhiker (which looks to be released in October) and am maybe a week or two away from the next draft of Where The End Began. After that, my life becomes The Caretaker.

Prince of Egypt Podcast

I think I’ve accidently created a theme of ‘podcast discussions where I effusively talk about 90s children’s properties that were way too dark for children’. Last month it was Animorphs, this time around I joined the crew of the ‘Hey, I Loved That Movie!’ podcast to discuss The Prince of Egypt.

I cheated a little here. This podcast is all about choosing a film that you loved as a kid, revisiting it as an adult, and discussing whether it holds up. Given I watch The Prince of Egypt a lot, I came in hot with my argument that yeah, this one stands the hell up and then some. It remains one of my biggest influences (the plot of the first Boone Shepard is basically this film, or the Book of Exodus if you’re splitting hairs) and, for my money, an underrated masterpiece.

But the ‘underrated’ part of my assessment led to some pretty fascinating and robust discussion about whether the film works best from a secular, religious, or formerly religious perspective, and it made me look at something I’ve always loved from a slightly more nuanced perspective. This was a great, thoughtful, in-depth chat and if you’ve seen the film I hope you give it a listen.

Recommendations

So I was among the lucky/stupid ones who watched The Oscars live and caught You Know What as it happened, although frankly it wasn’t nearly as funny as The Flash entering the speed force. And while I’ve kind of had no time for the circle jerk of the Oscars for a while, I did end up watching a couple of the nominees and man I’m glad I did.

The Power of the Dog is a brilliant film that should have won but also shouldn’t have been nominated for Best Picture. It’s way darker, thornier and more ambitious than Coda, but the latter is also the kind of crowd-pleaser that can achieve popular acclaim while Dog is the one you lie awake at night thinking about. Toxic masculinity has become a kind of overused term in the last few years that prompts a lot of not-unjustified eye rolling (just look at every fevered attempt to analyse what happened at the Oscars as anything other than a pampered celebrity throwing a hissy fit), but this film examines it in a way that lesser films don’t. By which I mean there isn’t some clunky line about the topic that might as well be accompanied by a smug request for applause. Dog explores difficult territory from unexpected angles, ratchetting up the tension until a disquieting and totally satisfying conclusion. I loved it.