With a brand New Year having arrived all too quickly, I’ve been thinking about what might be happening in 2022 with regard to my books. I’ve now written twelve Mac Maguire mysteries and the thirteenth is about a third of the way there. This one will be set at Christmas and a Mac Maguire book set during the festive season is something that I’ve been trying to achieve for quite a while. In order to ensure that I succeed this time, I will continue writing this book during the early part of the year and will hopefully have it completed by June or July. If my plan works out then I should have no problem in publishing it in the run-up to next Christmas.

Does that mean that I will only be publishing only one book this year then? No.

It’s my intention to write a sequel to The Black Vaults Experiment, which is, after all, subtitled ‘The First in the Ghost Field series‘. It seems that the time to write the sequel, working title ‘The Black Vaults Revisited’, is well overdue. I have recently re-edited the first book and have also given it a new cover. I suppose that it’s always been a bit of an issue with me that I wrote the first book and announced that it was the first of a series and have never gotten around the writing the second. I re-read it while I was on holiday and, while the fact that some editing was required was very evident, I also realised how much I liked some of the characters. So, while I’ve no idea as yet how the story might develop, I’m looking forward to getting back to the North London cold spot with some new characters and see what happens.

However, I’ll be far from giving up on Mac Maguire. As I’ve said, he should make his appearance again before Christmas and it’s my intention to start writing the fourteenth Mac Maguire mystery later this year so that it will be ready in early 2023.

2021 was a terrible year for many of us and it was also a year when it appeared that the ghost of fascism, like Lord Voldemort, might be rising from the grave again. However, we must cling to the notion that reason will win out in the end. What gives me real hope is the countless acts of kindness and consideration for others in these hard times that we see happening all around us every day. Things aren’t perfect, and probably never will be, but yet we can still know joy.

As the great poet Bob Marley said –

“Just because you are happy it does not mean that the day is perfect but that you have looked beyond its imperfections.”