Never say never have turned out to be wise words where my writing is concerned. I said (in a taped interview, so it's on record), that I would not revisit New Hope Island after completing my Colony trilogy with the closing novel Harvest of Scorn, which seemed when I finished it to wrap matters up fairly emphatically.

But about two months ago a premise occurred to me and it was this: the head of a Moscow-based centre for psychic research thinks New Hope Island the perfect location for some experimentation concerning the paranormal. He's very, very wrong. And he's beginning to suspect that he is. But the mission has financial backers too ruthless - and frankly too sinister - to dare to disappoint.

I'm now 30, 000 words in, so about a third of the way through a stand-alone that nevertheless features a few familiar characters. Like me, these people swore they'd never go back to that isolated lump of Hebridean granite. But one consistent feature of my fiction is that no one is really in control of their own fate. They're destined to revisit the island despite themselves.

I won't say anything further about the plot, other than one small detail that might be of interest to those of you familiar from past reading with little Rachel Ballantyne. It transpires that Seamus Ballantyne's daughter wasn't an only child. Rachel didn't only have a sister, she had a twin. Which might be sobering news for my studious Russian and his team of occult experts. As I write, they're three days away from setting off. I can only wish them luck, since they're really going to need it.