Just a short update on my current work. I’ve completed my novel The Crow Journal and sent out samples with query letters to a small number of agents in the right genre market (and choosing that was difficult – is a novel set in 1850s London, that involves elements of mystery, magic and teen angst defined as Fantasy, Historical or Drama?) and now I wait to see what happens.

I’m pleased with the novel, having started it way before A Step Beyond Context and then put it aside, rediscovering it more than a year later and seeing the potential there before redrafting the whole thing. It tells the story of a young man in the early Victorian era who travels to London to seek the truth about his mixed Faerie/Human heritage and becomes embroiled in a plot that may tear apart the secret order of Magi that dwell in the capital. I’m pleased with the background setting, and feel it shows glimpses of a wider world than is required simply to serve the need of the story, and I think the narrative voice – the hero telling his story directly to the reader – gives the tale a companionable and accessible feel.

We’ll see. Keep your fingers crossed everyone and I’ll keep you posted.

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Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

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The tavern hall was crowded that night, with raucous voices raised in laughter or contention and the thick sweet smell of acrid violets in the air that spoke of intoxicants other than ale and wine.   Zaira the singer moved through the press of people, accepting their accolades and compliments for the performance that she had just finished.  She had sung of bold heroes and far away places, of love and loss, and the crowd had cheered or groaned by turn, and filled her bowl with coin.  Not enough coin of course, to Zaira there was never enough coin.   She was a beautiful woman, dark and lithe and she had earned her living in this tavern and others like it in the city of Telek Tarim and had always dreamed of leaving behind the riverside wharves and the stink of poverty in favour of a new and perfumed life elsewhere.   Never enough coin for that, but always ways of obtaining more.

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