Well its finally here, 3 years after the original short story, The esoteric Cricket Ball is pitching down the leg side… The novel started out as half page of dialogue between two unknown participants written about ten years ago. It became a short story in a Harvey Duckman Anthology when I stumbled back across it three years ago and while writing the short story I fell in love with the two main characters Lucifer Mandrake and Sir William Forshaw, and the interplay between them.

That drove me to take the short story and create the novel. A novel set in a Victorian England where magic exists. Both characters go on something of a journey in the novel. A journey that takes both of them to places I never really expected to them to go when I started all this.

Other things sprang form the pages as I wrote the novel, The Men in Dark Tweed where born within its pages, a marvelous ditty about ‘The maggot of Salamanca, the basis of other projects yet to begin and much more, but its started with a forgotten piece of dialing and now we have this…

Lucifer Mandrake, Arcanist to the court of St James, by appointment of Queen Victoria Saxe-Coburg, is not having his best day. Someone has been resurrecting dead peers of the realm. The House of Lords is now inhabited by the undead. Sooner or later, someone is bound to notice. Well probably. Is this just a plot to derail The Witchcraft Bill? Or is it something more insidious, such as a plan to remove Victoria as head of state and replace her with the King of Hanover?
Mandrake must brave the Fae realm and its denizens, doppelgangers, necromancy, a prison of amber, conspirators in the highest level of government, malevolent men in dark tweed, and worst of all, the cricket, in order to save the crown.
All the while Lucifer must keep a secret of his own, the secret of Luci Drake, she who dwells within.

Magic, mayhem and impeccable manners, in a Victorian world where magic is real.

As I have written the novel I have on more than one occasion blogged about it, so regular readers of these uttering will be aware of it i am sure. But as I say, finally it is here…

All I need now is for some people to buy a copy and read it..