Tag: Jekyll & Hyde: Winter Retreat

My writing year 2025

My Victorian murder mystery Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives was released in paperback in September, and its sequel, Jekyll & Hyde: Winter Retreat came out in hardback in October, both published by Titan Books. While the first book is a cat-and-mouse chase featuring Muriel Carew and body-sharing detectives Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, the second novel is a full-on country house murder mystery with a locked-room murder and a large cast of suspects. There’s even a floorplan on the endpapers! It was a head-scratcher to plot out, I can tell you.

My second short story collection, Great Robots of History, was published by Black Shuck Books in March. It’s a collection of weird tales that are not quite about robots, for the most part, but instead about automatons and robot-like figures from history and myth. I’m really proud of it, and I’m delighted that it’s shown up in various end-of-year roundups, including being selected as one of Happy Goat Horror’s favourite collections of the year.

I had twelve new short stories published this year.

Six new stories were published in my collection Great Robots of History:

  • The Funnel
  • The Ichor Ran Out of Him Like Molten Lead
  • Icarus and His Wise Father Daedalus
  • Ask and Embla
  • A Box of Hope: A Can of Worms
  • Milk-White

Those were the publications under my own name… but this year I also started a side project, writing mystery fiction under the pseudonym TJ Hext.

Game of Liars is a bit like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None or Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party, with the murders committed on the set of a challenge gameshow that’s rather like The Traitors. It’s a pacy read, and a big, complex mystery with multiple narrators and plenty of twists.

The Amateur Corpse and The Corpse in the Shambles are the first two short novels in the York Murders series, which revolves around cheerful retired amateur sleuth Hazel Hausswolff. The first book features a murder during a murder mystery party at York Treasurer’s House in the shadow of the Minster; the second book concerns a murder on York’s most famous medieval street, in strange circumstances: a river of blood on the cobbles, and ants scurrying from the corpse.

2025 projects

This year I wrote:

  • An 81,000-word draft of a (sort of) mystery novel set in the art world
  • The final 20,000 words of the first TJ Hext York Murders novel, the full 40,000 words of the second novel, plus the first 20,000 words of the third book in the series
  • Four short stories

In total, I wrote 181,950 words and spent 284 hours writing or editing.

Looking ahead to 2026

The first item on the agenda next year is to finish the third York Murders novel, and my intention is to add more books to the series throughout the year, in between projects written under my own name. Then I’ll set my mind to rewriting substantial parts of the art-world novel. It’s more ambitious than any of my novel-length work to date, and it’ll be difficult to get right, but I’m excited to take on the challenge.