Since the February 28 publication date isn't that far away, here are some specifics about the next novel. Some of you might remember that the ritual that restored dead WW1 soldier Patrick Ross to (a sort of) life in my novel The Waiting Room was formulated originally by a 16th century German alchemist named Gunter Keller. The ritual is rediscovered early in the 20th century in that story, so Keller is very much a background figure.

In this one, in the here and now, history professor Juliet Harrington believes Keller to have been the principle architect of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom, a potent spell-book compiled by a cabal of the greatest occultists of his age.

The story is predicated on the notion that powerful magic exacts a powerful price - nature's way of objecting to reversals in the natural order of things. These calamities are preceded by strange events, the Auguries of the title. When a lunar eclipse no astronomer predicted is followed by an inexplicable tragedy involving great loss of life, Juliet suspects the Almanac has been rediscovered and is being used. Specifically, in London.

This is indeed the case, and the person who has rediscovered it is a precociously bright 14-year-old sufficiently gifted at languages and maths to understand its dense Latin text and arcane codification. Dawn Jackson is an angry, isolated, disassociated adolescent. In some ways the perfect candidate to find the Almanac, but in others the worst possible person to use it, because she is indifferent to the wider consequences.

As crisis escalates and spreads around the world, Juliet embarks on a quest to find the book and its user, convinced that Keller's secret agenda in compiling it was to accelerate the End Times.

My last novel, The Lucifer Chord, was in some ways deliberately understated. The paranormal element was ambiguous, the events largely open in retrospect to rational interpretation. This one is a story on a much bigger scale. And it has two time-frames - the present day and the period in which the Almanac was compiled, when we hear first hand from Keller and from the man who commissioned it, English Tudor Baron Edmund Fleury. Keller is vain, arrogant and merciless. Fleury is noble, loving, loyal and kind. So why on earth did he pay a king's ransom for the creation of something so potently deadly? That's a question the story fully addresses. I'm not daft enough to answer it here!