Hello Detectives,

I hope you’ve enjoyed the holiday season, and taken a chance to rest after a very busy and strange year. It’s felt as though the world has tried to push us all back into ‘normal’ life even though we’re not quite ready, and things are not quite normal. It’s been lovely and hard, in equal measures, at least for me.

Time has felt very strange for me this year – I started off the year with a very bad draft of a book, The Ministry of Unladylike Activity, and ended the year with that book being published. I still don’t really know how I did it. I don’t think I slept much. I also very dramatically got Covid on the last afternoon I worked on the final draft of Ministry, and sweated through the last pages of edits before pressing send and then basically not getting out of bed apart from to eat and look after the baby for the next three months. I would not recommend it, personally!

But now the book is out, and people seem to like it, and I’m halfway through the first draft (really the 0th draft, my first drafts never count because they are so dramatically bad) of Ministry 2. We have a title for it (I can’t tell you what it is yet), and a plot (I can tell you a bit about that – basically it’s the Blitz in London, and there’s a dead body in a bombed-out house that should definitely not be there …) and I’m really enjoying working on it. Last time I was still working out who Eric and Nuala were, and how I wanted to write about them, but now I’m a lot clearer about my main characters, so I can focus on the plot. And I’m excited about the plot!

Ministry 2 will be out either at the end of 2023 or at the beginning of 2024, depending on how well this draft goes and what my editor thinks of it. But I can tell you for definite that the UK/Irish paperback of Ministry 1 will be out in May – and the German, Italian and Polish translations will be out at some point in 2023 as well!

I’m going to have lots more events, both in-person and online, next year, so look out for those announcements in early 2023. And I really, really hope that 2023 will be the year that I finally get to tell you something about MMU TV …

So stick around – I’ll update here when I can, although of course my first priority is always going to be writing.

More adventures on the way very soon …