A new era of adventures begins.

A while ago, I thought how much fun it would be to write a book combining some characters. I half-heartedly ruminated the working title of ‘The Nancy Boys and Hardy Drew’, but in the end, it was when I was writing the fifth Coco book the idea came to me. Enter Lucien Olivier Minoru, an asexual young man of Korean descent and his shady (?) organisation Declension, a sort of cyber security type company and from that, we get “Les Enquêteurs” (The Investigators), a brand new series that allows me to take a story and use interchangeable lead characters. I expect Lucien will always feature, but it’s early days, so I haven’t really decided. The brand's flexibility also means that we aren’t strictly aligned to a particular type of story; it doesn’t always need to be a police procedural, or a mystery, which makes it particularly interesting for me.

After I completed the first book in the Hugo prequel trilogy, I knew right away that the story of Josef Levy wasn’t finished and that I would write a story just about him and what happened to him after he left Paris in 1996. For one reason or another, that story got put on the back burner as I finished the trilogy and worked on other Hugo and Coco books, but I never forget my promise to myself to tell Josef’s story. And then, when I began working on the first “Les Enquêteurs” story, I stopped and wondered whether Josef’s story would fit under that umbrella. I’d already decided that the Josef novel would move between 1996 and the present day, so that idea fit nicely into my new series, and I have now begun work on it. 

‘Josef’ begins in present-day Paris, a young student Ivri wanders alone. He has no friends, no real sense of purpose. Born in Israel but of French descent, he has never felt like he belonged anywhere. When a shocking revelation rocks his family, Ivri must return to Jerusalem to be with his family, and it is then that his father, Josef, reveals a shocking and tragic past that will change all of their lives forever.

When we last saw Josef, he was waving a tearful au revoir to Hugo, and as we’ve been with Hugo since 2015 and there has been no mention of Josef in any of these novels, we have to wonder why. At the end of ‘Hugo & Josef’, it was clear their time together was over, but would it be forever? I hope to explore the consequences of choices and actions in' Josef'. Can Hugo and Josef exist together the same way they did in 1995? I hope we get the answer to that question in this book…

I’m honestly excited to share these characters, some brand new, some blasts from the past with you. My current aim is to continue writing new stories from all three series, but now I can move the characters around and pair them with different characters. I hope you’ll join me on this new journey!

As always, I send you love and light and wish you all the best.

Thanks for sticking with me,

Gx