Stephen has a love for history, archaeology, palaeontology and music, and as he is easily distracted, usually has several stories ‘under construction’ at any one time.
It’s best to get the stories out this way, otherwise his head might explode. Which would not be pretty.
Here are just some of the projects Stephen is working on, with more to come!
For Keeps - Rookstone
A chilly, supernatural, nostalgic comedy set in the 90s.
Springtime, 1994. Grunge. The Kremlin Accords. Cool Britannia is on the way! For Gary Stone, Rookstone Castle is just another restoration project, until its owner shows him a sixty-year-old photograph that cannot be.
Unsettled, he gets to work, but is soon terrorised at 02:17 each morning by an ancient spirit with an urgent message. Failing to understand her warning, his team become unwitting accessories to a jewel heist. As the man in charge, Gary struggles to envision how things could get any worse – which only illustrates the limits of his imagination.
Besieged by the police and the media outside, hostage to dangerous criminals inside, the hangry builders are trapped in a castle full of ghosts with a psychopath and a Jack Russell named Poppy… and they are running out of sandwiches.
MINTED
The eagerly awaited sequel to The Apothecaries.
Summer AD1399. Sir Ralph is now running Warmstirrup, while his brother – and Harry-the-Cough’s sponsor, Lord Henry – is away in the south, embroiled in a civil war to supplant Richard II with Henry Bolingbroke.
By trying to help a friend, Harry becomes involved with an illegal coin counterfeiting ring and risks everything to bring only the guilty to justice – before Sir Ralph hangs him, as the finale to the revels at Warmstirrup’s Summer Fayre. Desperate to keep his new wife out of danger, Harry has problems enough, without constant berating from Insane Alice, his mum’s ghost.
New World SLICES
What happened before, what happens next, and what happened while we were all looking the other way
NEWFOUNDLAND
The tale of Captain Arnold Bessel, Lieutenant Audrey Jansen, Commander Morecombe Hetfield, Dr Kelly Marston and the crew of the USS Newfoundland. Picking up from the initial disappearance of the USS New World, Bessel travels back in time to rescue his friend, Captain Douglas, but it will be another twenty million years before they are reunited.
Meanwhile, infighting and ignorance of no-longer-extinct animals brings their party to the edge of extinction themselves. Surviving the life and times of Matilda, the aggressively territorial Tyrannotitan — a plus-sized lady with a decidedly negative attitude — proves more difficult for Marston and Hetfield even than their plans to rear a pair of baby sauropod dinosaurs. A hundred million years into the future, poor choices will lead to many being caught out by the eventual size of their pets. What would they know?
REBIRTH
Geoff Lloyd’s voyage through astrology and Elizabethan politics, on a one-man mission to save the world. Meanwhile, in the deep past of the Cretaceous Period, a new civilisation is born.
