Oceans Deep  opens in a world of rising geopolitical tension. President Trump pulls the U.S. out of its NATO commitments, creating a power vacuum in Europe. The narrative follows several interconnected characters. Clio Strong, Director-General of Britain's SIS ("C"), is tasked with navigating the crisis. Her niece, Royal Navy Lieutenant Aphi Macmorris, is an officer aboard HMS Scimitar , a Trident nuclear missile submarine. Her boyfriend, James Bardolph, is a junior minister

I’m always in a rush. I’m impatient. It would be be too convenient to blame my slapdash, hasty approach on my twenty years working as a news agency journalist, when seconds and minutes mattered on a breaking news story, though it’s tempting to do so.     My query letters to agents and publishers have too often fallen short, I admit, and I don’t just mean infelicities of syntax or dreaded typos, both of which are mortal errors in the submission process.     The same goes for t

Your novel is as ready as you think it can be, and you send it out... Here’s the automated email response from a leading UK literary agent to a submission query:      ‘If we’re interested in reading more of your work, we aim to be in touch with you within eight weeks. We look at every submission we receive, and carefully consider each one, but please do be aware that due to the volume of submissions we receive, we’re unfortunately not able to respond to every writer individua

People sometimes ask me questions about writing, so here are a few things that occasionally come up in conversation. How do you write?   ...

A newspaper report about the suspicious death of a British intelligence officer, whose remains were found in his London flat, provided...

A friend of mine who’d just finished helping to edit my latest thriller, Armistice Day, asked me whether I’d had to seek pre-publication...

Like millions of others, I watched a video clip of last year’s Armistice Day - the annual  commemoration of the civilian and military...

Just the other day, I realised with something of a shock that I’ve made my living by writing in one form or another for more than half a...

Do I have a special place to write? Somebody asked me the question and the answer was no, I don’t. I think I said I sometimes write at...