Joe's and Amber's lives have changed, their fates engineered by unseen forces. The Order is not the organisation they thought it was. Universal secrets exist that Joe and Amber have only just begun to reveal, but for their own safety they have had to be separated.
Can they stay hidden from their enemies and find a way to stem the tide of chaos beginning to sweep through the world?
"You can't go home, Amber. You know perfectly well that you don't have one anymore. Home's gone. Daddy's gone. Joe's long gone from your dreary life, but he lingers on in your head, doesn't he? Like a footprint or a ghost. A faded sketch of the boy you once knew."
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REVIEWS
***** "A great dark fantasy for young adults and adults alike"
***** "Thoughtfully written, full of atmosphere and believability"
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AND A BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR...
How do you find inspiration in your writing?
It comes from my “inner world” rather than anything else- I suppose you could say I just dream things up and write them down, and I stay true to my "voice". I'd rather be authentic than a unit-shifter. I know how to write exactly the sort of thing I *want* to write, and because that took years to work out, I just want to keep doing it.
Inevitably, human nature is a big influence on what I write and how I write it. I also think that it helps the rare “good guys” (or more usually in my works, the “not quite as evil as the other ones” guys) stand out more. Like splashes of colour on a backcloth of absolute black.
If you couldn’t be an author, what ideal job would you like to do?
I've never been a particular fan of employment. I don't believe we were put here or brought into existence just to do someone else's bidding in order to have access to food and a roof over our heads- but then, that's idealism for you.
My flippant answer would be a job where I don't have to do anything and can just read or listen to music all day or go wandering in the woods, and didn't have to "work as part of a team" [shudder]. Again, that's idealism for you.
How do you develop your plots and characters?
The plots seem to just come to me in sudden bursts of inspiration and enlightenment- I can be struggling for ages and suddenly I'll come up with an idea, or a way to bind two parts of a plot together and tie up loose ends (although I often deliberately leave some ends untied... I like to think "What if...?" about my own work, maybe revisit it at some point or just idly ponder what might have happened to one or more of the protagonists after the curtain falls. For me, the world I created continues in my mind forever- in a way the closure of the book or books is really just the end of a chapter in a wider saga which may or may not ever be written. There are more potential stories out there than atoms in the universe, after all.
