Tempest is in jail after happily pleading guilty to assaulting Chief Inspector Quinn, but the jail in Maidstone is an ancient place filled with stories and legends.
The Golem in Block C has reaped victims in the past and is back to claim a new one. Can Tempest unravel this mystery while he is incarcerated? Or will he fall victim to the same creature that just took the life of a guard.
All you have to do is click the link to find yourself transported to a hidden part in the back of my website. You’re going to love it.
If you are reading this as a paperback, obviously the link will not do it. But you can copy it by hand into your web browser to achieve the same effect.
Good luck.
Author’s Notes
Hello, reader,
It is the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday as I write this final note. I finished the book in the small hours of this morning, staying up to crank out the last chapters because I was in a flow at that point.
I’m not entirely sure my wife approved of me sliding into bed at 0224hrs, but it’s not like I was just getting in from the pub. She was good enough to leave me there to get an extra half an hour this morning, so I awoke when our baby daughter, who turns one this month, started poking me. She was tucked up next to me and had a smile for me when she discovered it was daddy and not mummy keeping her company.
This turned out to be the hardest book I have written since Damaged but Powerful about twelve months ago. On both occasions, it is the timeline that has thrown me. Most of my books I write chronologically from start to finish, the story flowing from my brain to the page in a flurry of fingers.
With The Sandman, I had already written The Ghoul of Christmas Past which overlaps the events in this story and thus created limitations on what I could write. I had not considered this until I sat down to write this book.
It was a bit of fiddle, and I kept trying to work out how to fit Patience into the story even though she was involved in events in the overlapping timeline. I am happy with the end result and hope you are too.
The dedication for this book is to a person in my author’s Facebook group. He came up with the camouflage jackets as Basic’s next endeavour and deserves the credit for his imagination. You can join the Facebook group too if you wish to, there is a link on the last page of this book. It’s a cool place to exchange questions and thoughts about my books and you can find information there that is not available anywhere else.
I mention etorphine in this book. It is a semi-synthetic opioid possessing an analgesic potency approximately 1,000–3,000 times that of morphine. It was first prepared in 1960 from oripavine, which does not generally occur in opium poppy extract but rather the related plants Papaver orientale and Papaver bracteatum. Interestingly, it is the drug used by the serial killer anti-hero in the TV show Dexter. Its effects as an incapacitant are instant.
The second world war bunker in Cobham Woods is a real thing, it just isn’t in Cobham Woods. I shifted it a couple of miles, but it exists in real life, not just my imagination. I really did stumble upon it while walking my dogs one day many years ago. Kent is littered with forgotten Spitfire hangers and sea defences from a time the oldest generation can just about remember but will seem like ancient history to my kids.
I have the chaps employ t-shirt guns in the bunker, but then found several of my advanced copy readers had no idea what it is. They use them at sports events and the like to launch t-shirts (and probably other soft merchandise items) into the back rows. It’s a wide tube with a compressed air can attached. The t-shirt is packed tightly into a pack so it is much like firing a bean bag gun only not so dangerous.
With this book ready for publication, I need to shift my attention to the short story that follows it. I will write that next, so it is ready for people to download by the time they are reading this. Then I have more cozy mystery fun with my Felicity Philips Investigates series. It’s time for book two in that series and then I have a Patricia tale to write and then another Albert, but the Blue Moon crew will be back really soon, and you can see the next book on the following page.
Take care.
Steve Higgs
What’s next for the Blue Moon Crew?
Incarcerated for a crime he gladly committed, paranormal detective, Tempest Michaels, has been enjoying the peace and quiet. But all that is about to change …
… there’s a monster roaming the prison’s passageways at night and it’s just taken a life.
The legend of the jailhouse golem is more than two hundred years old and though it has been investigated in the past, no one has ever come close to solving the mystery.
He won’t get paid for this one, but there’s something more valuable at stake … his life.
Surrounded by inmates who want to kill him, facing a creature that cannot be killed because it isn’t alive, and worried the very guards employed to protect him might be the ones behind it all, Tempest Michaels faces his toughest challenge yet.
Worse yet, he’s all alone.
Get ready for a tale so fast paced you’ll lose your breath!
The paranormal? It’s all nonsense, but proving it might get him killed.
A FREE Rex and Albert Story
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