Stories

When fourteen-year-old Daniel and his mother are kicked out by his stepfather, they have to move to a housing estate in a different part of town, and Daniel has to change schools. He has a hard time making friends, and it only gets worse when one of his classmates takes a rather unhealthy interest in him. His only comfort, to his great surprise, turns out to be the last person he could have expected; the popular and gorgeous Michael Storm.

Ben and Colin are comfortably in each other's lives, but the path of true love is never an easy one, and a mistake throws Ben's loyalties to the wind. Not only that, but the mystery behind the deaths of Denny and the rent boys remains unsolved. Carter only had a list of hits. Were Colin a different person he might leave things well alone. But the thing about sleeping dogs is that some people can never let them lie.

The sleepy village of Crumbington is about to get a wake-up call.

When the new chairperson of the Summer Fête Committee pushes to create a naked calendar of the Crumbington football team, mouths drop open. Her further pronouncement at having snagged a celebrity host for the fête—rising television and movie star Clifton O’Keefe, and ex-resident of Crumbington—is met with indifference.

Not by Nathan Fresher, though, local baker and captain of the football team. He had been Clifton’s boyfriend in high school, until Clifton and his family disappeared into the night over ten years ago.

Rothenia celebrates as Svetlana wins the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv, for that means the Greatest Show on Earth will come to Strelzen in all its camp glory in 2005. The possibilities for Strelsenermedia IPC are not lost on Will Vincent and his team. But the Song Contest will come to a divided city, and caught up in the politics are Yuli Lucic, son of the Staroman of Strelzen, and Henry Atwood, who can never let a story go, whatever the distractions.

Justin Peacher-White has it all, a partner, lifestyle and job to die for. But as a street kid he put it about a bit, and now finds he has a small son. Justin determines on finding the boy, and is far more successful than he and Nathan are quite ready to cope with. For Damien Macavoy is no ordinary child.

Jed is a man of interesting talents used to life on the northern coast of California. Things are fairly sedate until a spate of murders begins to occur, bringing an interesting stranger to town.

Brandon works for a company that sells point of sale equipment in the IT department. His life has been on hold since his husband and their daughter died, but now there is Hal in Sales and Isaac from across the hall. How, exactly, do you make a family?

Landon pushed his luck too far this time, and nothing's the same anymore.

Events on a small New England college campus, following an exceptional one. Gil Andrus and his husband, Pete Sordan, follow through the usual faculty politics and the unexpected mystery. And Don Burris, the detective from The Pendleton Omens, reappears.

Note: this book shares roots and occasionally overlaps with my other book, Quabbin, which is also set in Waldron, Massachusetts, though in a national clothing company. But they're different books with different sensibilities.

Henry has made it to university, but without Ed. Instead he finds himself in a first-year house share in Cranwell with Eddie Peacher, Andy’s problem brother, and the nervous Gavin. Between them, they find themselves combating the appalling Frank Hutchinson, landlord of the King's Cross, and unearth a mystery of the ages, to solve which is death.