The Way to Icy Death

This week, in the face of a good deal of interference from one of my cats, who decided to see something scary in the garden which inspired him to use my keyboard as a stepping-stone to the conservatory window-sill, and some time fruitlessly spent trying to evict Copilot from my Word setup, I published Pitkirtly 30, The Way to Icy Death. Here are two links to follow if you would like to read it:

Link to the ebook on Amazon UK: https://amzn.eu/d/03UHPK6N

Link to many other ebook sources: https://books2read.com/u/4NznV9

Please note that at the time of writing this post, the second link should allow you to find your way to the ebook on Kobo, Apple, Everand, Smashwords and a few others. More online retailers will be added to the same link eventually, but some take longer than others to publish. So if you’ve left it a while to read the post, you might find more options.

This book is the 30th in my Pitkirtly Mysteries series. For reasons which will become evident, the story revolves around Kyle Prestonfield and his family, although most of the usual characters will play their parts too, especially when it comes to consuming far too many doughnuts.

Now that I’ve reached 30 books I feel I can risk confessing that I didn’t have any idea of a plot when I started to write this one – something which happens from time to time, especially in the Pitkirtly series, where I can use my previous knowledge of the characters to guess what they might do next. Occasionally (I am particularly looking at ‘Unrelated Incidents’ here) this results in a plot that gets tied in knots, but in ‘The Way to Icy Death’ I seem to have stayed more or less on topic throughout, despite working on another novel at the same time.

Fortunately it wasn’t until the last stages of writing it that real life events began to get in the way. The community centre AGM, the complete breakdown of our central heating and subsequent visit of an aggressive boiler salesman, text messages reminding me that I needed to take the cats for their vaccinations, go to the dentist, take the car for servicing, have the electricity and gas meters replaced, get my eyes tested…. In stark contrast to January, which went on forever, February wasn’t long enough to fit it all in. I have high hopes about starting something new in March, though.