“My name is Thomas Locke. I am a private detective and what I’m about to say might sound strange, but it is absolutely true.”
Vincent Holland-Keen’s (Billy’s Monsters) debut novel The Office of Lost and Found is fueled by a cast of wonderfully quirky and endearing characters, and unfolds as several parallel, if time-bending, plots.
Thomas Locke is not just a detective, he’s a detective capable of finding anything, anywhere, no matter how long lost or how well hidden. He is the “found” half of The Office of Lost and Found.
Locke’s partner, Lafarge, brings new meaning to the term shadowy, literally appearing only as a tall, dark figure cloaked deep in shadows. He is the “lost” half of The Office of Lost and Found, and you better be sure you really want something lost before seeking his help, because things Lafarge loses stay lost. Permanently.
This was old Miami, classic, historic, with a coat of paint over something darker and more dangerous.
It’s been a year since we last saw Pete Fernandez in Silent City. And while he made it out of the events of that book alive, he may wish he hadn’t.
Fernandez has lost his job as a journalist, his marriage has fallen apart, his best friend was killed, and he’s learned those closest to you are the ones whose betrayal hurts the most—and are the ones that you never see coming.
Hey, Kids, Collect them All: The Awful Truth About Completism
I suspect the syndrome began when I read the backs of serial packets in the 1950s and was urged by the manufacturers of Shredded Wheat and Rice Crispies to make sure that I had the complete set of the plastic Space Men/Pirates/Guardsmen/Divers/Miniature Nuclear Submarines that they were offering. Sadly, I was rarely able to eat enough Rice Crispies or Shredded Wheat to succeed: but the lust for the complete set was planted.
I think in literature the process began with the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge, if only because the art on the dust jackets of the adventures of the boys at Jennings school was so colorful and full of delight.
Interestingly, although I loved Captain W.E.Johns’ Biggles books, I was never tempted to try to collect them all because there was simply so many– and the same applied to Richmal Compton’s magnificent William books.
I think the enthusiasm for complete sets really took hold courtesy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At the age of 11, a newly arrived emigrant in New Zealand and staying at a Salvation Army hostel in Cuba Street, Wellington, I discovered in the window of the bookstore opposite a hardback copy of the John Murray edition of His Last Bow. It had a white cover decorated with the magnificent painting of Sherlock Holmes holding, of all things, a cockerel. It was some years before I was able to get a copy for myself and by that time I had discovered that the painting was one of a whole series of Holmes which decorated the covers of all the books in the Collected edition from The Adventures onwards.
The Long Goodbye
I began the writing of ABIDE WITH ME – my debut novel – some time in 2010. I never plan anything I write, and ABIDE WITH ME was no different. What I discovered very quickly, however, was whilst I thought I was telling the story of Kenny – a young lad with unspecified autism – the story I was actually telling was that of John, the narrator of the book.
As the story unfolded, and John began to tell me of his childhood years, various aspects of my own childhood began to filter into the book. I wrote the final few chapters of ABIDE WITH ME with tears running down my face. At the end of it all, I was emotionally shattered. That’s when I realised I’d stopped telling John’s story a long way back, and the story I was really telling was my own. Not the plot, as such, but the themes and the characters. Each were intrinsically a part of me, and always had been.
By the final chapter, I was broken.
I had nothing left.
The book was incredibly well received – something I hadn’t anticipated. In hindsight, ABIDE WITH ME was all about the purging of myself, the making it out alive. I had no thought that it might touch others as it did.
There were two constant themes to the feedback I began to receive – ‘What a great film it would make’ and ‘When is the sequel coming out?’
There would be no sequel. I was sure of that. After the first one broke me in half? You’ve got to be kidding. In terms of the story, there was ample room for a sequel, but I refused to write one simply because people wanted me to. The story, for me, had ended.
You’ve always kept busy as a writer, both through your work in comics and novels, as well as your background in journalism, but 2016 is posed to be a particularly bountiful year for you. It kicked off in January with the digital short exclusive Bad Beat, a crossover you co-wrote with Rob Hart. The story features both your character, Pete Fernandez, and his, Ash McKenna (New Yorked, City of Rose). How’d that collaboration come about, and what was it like co-writing with someone in a purely prose setting versus the collaborative work you’ve done in comics?
It came up really organically, which was nice. Rob and I were having dinner after an event and got to talking about our mutual affection for comics, which lead us to talk about great crossover. Eventually, we latched onto the idea of doing it with our own characters in advance of our new books. By the time we were on our respective trains home, Jason Pinter at Polis Books had OK’d the idea and we were off.
I’m not going to lie, I was a little worried the idea would fizzle – mainly because Rob and I are both very busy. But the writing was seamless and easy. We brainstormed the outline and where the story fit in our respective character timelines and then split up the work. We’d each take turns writing our sections and then took passes editing the whole thing. We both have journalism backgrounds, so I think that helped in terms of letting someone else tinker with your work. The end result was a fun story – and one that I got to nod to in the reissued version of SILENT CITY, making it more “canon.”
Rob and I have similar sensibilities and work ethics and I love the Ash books, so it was really a treat to work with him. I hope we can do it again, if the stars align the right way.
I’m sort of like Death’s GPS. — Finn Harding
Finn “Mr. Finn” Harding has a unique talent for finding people, even those who desperately don’t want to be found. Unfortunately for the people he locates, once he finds them they’re usually never seen again—hence, Death’s GPS.
Once a legit, licensed private investigator, Finn strayed a little too far over the line into murky ethical waters during an assignment for a client and had his license revoked by the state of Ohio. Now, he’s been reduced to working for people who not only don’t care he doesn’t have a license, they kinda prefer it given they work outside the law themselves.
When Bishop, the owner of an underground website called Dark Brokerage that traffics in stolen sensitive and financial information, becomes the target of a blackmailer who hacked the site, Finn is hired to locate the source blackmail. Easy enough, it’s Finn’s speciality after all.
Except, once Finn locates the blackmailer it doesn’t end there. Bishop persuades Finn to accompany fix-it man Little Freddie to…take care of the problem. Little Freddie will do all the heavy lifting, Finn is assured, he’ll just be along for the ride as backup. Right.
Though the task doesn’t go quite as planned, Finn gets more involved than he’d prefer, he and Freddie are successful, leading to an offer of more work for Finn from Bishop. Against his better judgment, Finn finds himself getting pulled farther and farther down a path he knows it’s not safe to be walking.
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“How are we going to run from them? How do you run from an agency that’s in the business of surveillance?” — Ian Ayres
There’s a saying that no good deed goes unpunished, and surely something similar to that has to be top of mind when Ian Ayres walks into the San Francisco law firm of Chris Bruen. A so-called “ethical hacker,” someone who hacks into companies at their request to test their cybersecurity and show them where their weaknesses are, Ayres found far more than he bargained for on his last job.
While conducting what he thought was a routine security probe, he came across information that indicates the existence of a highly classified, top-secret government organization, one which has apparently developed a program called Skeleton Key that can break any form of encryption. Unclear whether the program is on the company’s servers intentionally or if they’re being hacked/surveilled, Ayres brings his discovery to their attention. And that’s when all hell breaks loose.
When the company that hired Ayres not only cuts all ties with him but denies having hired him in the first place and accuses him of hacking their system, Ayres knows he’s stumbled onto something far out of his league and that he desperately needs help. Enter Chris Bruen. A former Department of Justice cybercrime prosecutor, Bruen is well known to those in the hacking community, and it’s him Ayres turns to for help. Along with his partner, Zoey Doucet, a former black-hat hacker turned ethical hacker, Bruen has literally just opened the doors of his new private practice for the first day of business when Ayres shows up on the doorstep with his problem, and a whole lot of trouble in tow.
December 24th - Berkley
