About ten days ago, a contract arrived in N.E. Switzerland. I signed, and sent it back to crime fiction publisher Hobeck Books, where it arrived on Friday. So now it’s official – book twelve is on the way, and I’m thrilled to have another Hobeck book in my collection. We’ve been doing structural edits for several weeks already, and the result is currently waiting to go to the copy editor later this month. Meanwhile, my eagle-eyed first beta reader (aka Son 1) is checking the numbers (ages are complicated in book twelve) and I’m preparing the file for my other pre-publication readers.

What’s it about? In a word – family. The Martins. There’s Holly, who’s a vet and married to Dylan, a stressed businessman. Dylan’s twin brother Seth lives in a nearby village, as does their mum Elaine and sixteen-year-old niece Megan. The book starts with a prologue, where a body is hurtling down a river in flood, then chapter one takes us back a couple of weeks, and the action continues from there.

Whose body?
How is it connected to the Martin family??
How – and why – did it end up in the river???

Find out in November…

I enjoyed writing (most of) this book. Researching the animal scenes for Holly the vet was great fun – I found a huge variety of TV documentaries to watch, as well as trawling through the internet and wandering around Swiss countryside and woodland, which hopefully isn’t too different to the English countryside and woodland my characters saw every day. Less fun were the school sequences with sixteen-year-old Megan – I will never, ever again write a book where the timing means a main character is in the middle of GCSE exams. It was all very different when I was at school in Glasgow, and you can google all you like, but you still get chunks wrong. Fortunately, help wasn’t far away, but more on that later too.

It won’t be too long before I have a cover image to share with you – we’ve had some interesting conversations about it and I can’t wait to see what the fabulous Hobeck cover designer comes up with! Watch this space, and meanwhile, I’ll leave you with some of that Swiss countryside and woodland.