I've been working on the page proofs for the third Sean Duffy novel, In The Morning I'll Be Gone. It's the school holidays at the moment and the house has been a little nuts so I took a cheap flight down to Hobart and then a bus down to Dover, Tasmania where I rented a cabin for a few days - which seemed like something a real writer would do. Dover is a pretty little out of the way town. There are a few fishermen, a few retirees and a few dodgy looking jailhouse inked Brits who I reckon have been shipped here to the far side of the world in some kind of Scotland Yard witness protection scheme....
You don't really think of extremes of cold in Australia but the first night in my cabin it was raining so hard and it got so cold that I had to get up and turn on the gas cooker and get warm by the welcoming blue flame. In the morning the mountain behind the town, Adamson's Peak, had a dusting of snow on top (but most of the snow had burned off by lunchtime when I took this photograph). There wasn't much to do in Dover which was precisely the point as I was forced to work my way through the galley proofs of In The Morning I'll Be Gone. Although if I'm perfectly honest I was so bloody freezing that I had to take breaks every twenty minutes or so to warm my fingers over the gas cooker.
...
And how is the book? Well I think it's the best Duffy yet. There's a taut thriller element, Michael Forsythe makes an appearance and if you like the intellectual puzzle of a locked room mystery I think you'll dig it. It'll be out in January and as usual I'll give away one of the rather attractive galleys here on the blog some time before that.
