Novels Novels

Published 2009

Twelve is the story of Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, a captain in the army of Tsar Alexander I, sworn to defend Russia against the onslaught of Napoleon's Grande Armée in the autumn of 1812. He joins forces with a band of twelve Wallachian mercenaries, whose zeal and success in slaughtering the French invaders seem too good to be true.

Soon, Aleksei unearths the gruesome secret behind the Wallachians' abilities, and discovers that they make little distinction between Frenchman or Russian. His fight becomes not simply one against Napoleon, but against a far more dangerous enemy.

To read an excerpt from Twelve, click here.

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Published 2010

1825, Europe – and Russia – have been at peace for a decade. Bonaparte is long dead and the threat of invasion is no more. For Colonel Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, life is peaceful. Not only have the French been defeated, but so have the twelve monstrous creatures he once fought alongside, and then against, all those years before. His duty is still to his tsar, Aleksandr the First, but today the enemy is merely human. 

But the tsar knows that he can never be at peace. He is well aware of the uprising fermenting within his own army, but what troubles him is something far more terrible – something that threatens to bring damnation down upon him, his family and his country. Aleksandr cannot forget a promise: a promise sealed in blood … and broken a hundred years before.

Now the victim of the Romanovs’ betrayal has returned to demand what is his. The knowledge chills Aleksandr’s very soul. And for Aleksei, it seems the vile pestilence that once threatened all he held dear has returned, thirteen years later…

To read an excerpt from Thirteen Years Later, click here.

Published August 2011

Russia 1855.  After forty years of peace in Europe, war rages. In the Crimea, the city of Sevastopol is besieged. In the north, Saint Petersburg is blockaded. But in Moscow there is one who needs only to sit and wait – wait for the death of an aging tsar, and for the curse upon his blood to be passed to a new generation.

As their country grows weaker, a man and a woman - unaware of the hidden ties that bind them - must come to terms with their shared legacy. In Moscow, Tamara Valentinovna Komarova uncovers a brutal murder and discovers that it not the first in a sequence of similar crimes, merely the latest, carried out by a killer who has stalked the city since 1812.

And in Sevastopol, Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov faces not only the guns of the combined armies of Britain and France, but must also make a stand against creatures that his father had thought buried beneath the earth, thirty years before.

Click here for an excerpt from The Third Section.

(Working title - Provisional UK publication 2013)

After a quarter of a century of his reign the reforms of Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator, have begun attract the attention of those who question whether Russia's future truly lies in his hands - or indeed in the hands of any dictator.

At the same time, deep in his Wallachian homeland, Zmyeevich, the arch voordalak, watches the distant events in Saint Petersburg and prepares for the day when the Romanovs will be replaced by a far more evil power - a power once known simply by the name Tepes.

(Working title - Provisional UK publication 2014)

The Eastern Front, 1917. Two soldiers, an uncle and his nephew, both bearing the name of Danilov, prepare for the encounter that has been inevitable since each was, in his own way, born.

But one of them carries in his blood an ancient curse, and may be means by which a monster that the nineteenth century had thought dead and buried might be resurrected in the twentieth. 

Dan Osborne and Thorton Traverscroft are world experts on Mr Sunday, a notorious killer who slew five women in Brighton in the 1930s. When a diary purporting to be written by the murderer is discovered, both dive in with gusto - one aiming to prove the diary's authenticity, the other to demonstrate beyond doubt that it is a fake.

When a new murder occurs in Brighton, duplicating in every detail the Mr Sunday killings, both men begin to wonder whether it is more than just the killer's diary that has returned from the past.

1293 AD - An aged monk witnesses the suicide of a young boy and turns to his desk to complete the last paragraphs of his final work; a work written in a code that he hopes no one will ever decipher.

2006 AD - An Oxford classicist discovers a previously unknown document written by the great thirteenth century scientist and alchemist Roger Bacon. As he deciphers Bacon's fiendish code, he reveals a seven-hundred-year-old secret that could destroy the foundations of the Internet itself.

To read an excerpt from Sifr, click here.

Paris 1819 - A young student befriends his landlord, Sergeant Mellé, a veteran of Bonaparte's disastrous Moscow campaign. The sergeant survived, and made his fortune, but is not happy.

Seven years before Mellé betrayed his closest companion, and the student eventually discovers that the veteran sergeant cannot escape his past. 

This historical ghost story is scheduled to be published by Subterranean Press in 2013.