I spent part of this past weekend putting the finishing touches on Belie, due out in a few weeks.  Most of this effort was spent tweaking the cover art and then scanning the manuscript for any last-minute, egregious errors that might come back to haunt me later in the series.  I have long lived in fear of accidentally doing x in a prior novel, only to claim yactually happened; so far, I’ve thankfully managed to avoid that particular misstep – but only because I obsess the way I do over ensuring my continuity remains intact.

This novel is the eight in the Sean Colbeth Investigates series.  I am still coming to terms with the fact that I’ve gotten this far, and that the character remains popular.  Belie, oddly, represents something of a turning point for Sean, too; it’s the first major case he’s taken on since transitioning to his new role with the State Police, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, we wind up with a front row seat as he struggles with the adjustment.  There are significant differences between being the Police Chief of a small waterfront village and a statewide commander of a crime taskforce, differences that at the end of the day have my detective wondering what the heck he was thinking when he took the job in the first place.  Will it grow on him?  Will he grow to like it and subsequently thrive?  I think both of those questions remain open by the end of the novel, forcing me to address them in his next novel.  Due out in 2026, the tentatively titled Aftermath has a lot to deal with in that regard; many of the decisions Sean has made in the past eight novels start to catch up to him, and not all of them are positive.

Before you think I’m heading down a path of breaking Sean in some way, let me hasten to assuage those fears; Sean has always been Sean, and is not a candidate for becoming one of those detectives that is haunted by prior acts.  I do see him as completely human, though, albeit one who often still fails to grasp the reality existing outside of his investigator bubble.  Every action Sean has taken over the course of the series put him on a path that I only vaguely saw all the way back in Blindsided.  Threads that were always there are now being tugged, leading to more questions that might have difficult answers.  And that’s just in his personal life; throw in a good mystery on top of that and you can see that I have the beginnings of an excellent stew I can’t wait to share with you next year.

Getting the band back together was also a priority for this next novel; it’s been a while since Vas assisted with an investigation, so it’s been fun to write scenes for the duo again.  Sean does make something of a cameo in the next Vasily Korsokovach book, Silenced, but it’s confined to just a few chapters; in Aftermath, the two are once more joined at the hip, though with the added benefit of both having had to work without the other for some time now.  I miss the witty repartee between them; in the new novel, that feels even more on point given the personal issues Sean is dealing with when we finally see him again.  

What are those, you ask?

Well, for starters Sean decides to drive to Florida to make peace with his estranged father.  If you have been playing along at home, you might have a good sense of how well that went – and what fallout might result from the visit.  And while you already know Sean is struggling with his new role as Commander, Major Crimes, you might not realize that all is not completely well between him and Suzanne; when we last saw them in Solitude, the proverbial hatchet had been buried, but events in Belie conspire to open old wounds that Sean is ill-prepared to deal with.  How he gets through that is as much a part of the plot of Belie as the murder – and sets up rather nicely what is yet to come in Aftermath.

2026 is going to be a fun year.