I have a new book out next month

And I'm returning to Substack

Hello, it’s good to be coming back.

To those of you who have been following this Substack for a while, I must apologise for the abrupt halt to proceedings back in the spring.

My daughter was very seriously ill and so I had to take time away from here to focus on my family. Thankfully, she is doing really well and I am now able to give some thought — and hopefully value — to my Substack readers.

And so with that in mind, I’d like to tell you about my new book!

Drum-roll

THE LADY IN THE LAKE: A Reporter's Memoir of a Murder will be published by Mirror Books on October 10.

It's another work of true crime (following my first book, THE JIGSAW MURDERS), and is about a real murder case from the 1990s that I reported on when I was at the Westmorland Gazette newspaper in the Lake District.

Here's a bit from the blurb:

A body in a lake. A wife missing for 21 years. A husband’s denial of murder. A crime reporter who was there revisits the shocking crime 25 years on.

The Lady in the Lake is a real-life murder mystery and true crime memoir that reads like a thriller. A dark secret resurfaces after 21 years in the English Lake District to devastate a family.

With powerful themes of murder and denial, the story spans five decades, from the 1970s to the present day.

In August 1997 Jeremy Craddock is a young newspaper reporter in the Lake District. When divers discover a suspicious package weighted down in Coniston Water he is thrust into the heart of the biggest story of his career, a haunting murder mystery that will stay with him for the next quarter of a century.

Watch this space

I’ll be talking more about the book and how I came to write it in coming newsletters, so for now I’ll love you and leave you.

Until next time…