Those enigmatic entities, the Storytellers of Muinbeo, know that History has something waiting in the wings. To set the scene for their audience, they relate a gripping tale about a death and its consequences. When her mentor is bitten by a rogue werewolf and “joins our hairy brethren howling at the moon”, apprentice detective Salmon Farsade is assigned to Hal McCabe, Detective Chief-Inspector and vampire, just in time for a murder. Fen Maguire has been stabbed, throwing the normally peaceful community of Ballinpooka into shock. The investigation into her death lifts the lid on more than just the name of her killer: political corruption, Outland conspiracy, academic deceit, and plain old-fashioned greed. A second murder follows: the clock is ticking, and as they seek a key to unlock the truth, the detectives are both helped and hindered by the various human and not-so-human beings that populate Muinbeo. For readers of...

Villa Grace is in disgrace. Her expulsion from school has ruined the prospect of a family holiday in imperial Prague, where her mother is organising a conference. Two of her three siblings are barely speaking to her, as all four face into a ‘holiday’ sweltering on Cobwell Farm in the back of beyond of drought-stricken Hibernia. But the power-hungry St. Maur Ker family has breached the border between mortal and sídhe for their own gain. Cobwell, on the threshold of myth, is about to become the centre of a battle between older, wilder forces and the technomantic ambitions of one of the empire’s great aristo–corporate clans. Caught up in this conflict, the children are forced to face up to the dark underbelly of their parents’ corporate environment, and to confront their own conflicting ambitions and loyalties. For readers of all ages. "Gorgeous and hilarious and profound."" Siobhán Parkinson

An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of despairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways. In these ten finely crafted and unsettling stories, Maxwell's slipstream style interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from a world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent. More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links—environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions...

My short stories are available for purchase individually as well as in collections in book form. Each new story I publish myself will be available as a standalone e-book; once sufficient stories have accumulated to warrant a book, a new collection will be issued in paperback and e-book formats. Collections may also include work published elsewhere, such as in magazines, once the rights have reverted to me. Click on the link to view and buy available titles.

As a good Sombrist, Hunter Sessaire is aware that not only lying, but curiosity, is very much frowned upon by his community. As an apprentice archivist, he cannot resist the temptation to puzzle out how a manuscript could have been stolen from the room within the Sombrists' Labyrinth. A room that opens only during a planetary alignment. An alignment that has not yet taken place. But this is not the only enigma abroad in Muinbeo. Seemingly disparate occurrences remain opaque even to those normally in the know. Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe is scratching his head over the inexplicable vanishing of his apprentice, Salmon Farsade, and the dramatic and destructive theft of an ancient silver hand from the local school museum. The boundaries of Muinbeo, carefully managed to keep the Outland and its machinations outside, where they belong, have become a bit more porous than McCabe would like. Not least...

The Moufet Institute’s mission is to protect endangered lepidoptera, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the ‘Players’ and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. Cuffe, recruited to create the rhetoric to underpin the new corporate vision, finds her inital confidence eroded by the peculiarities of the Institute and its environment—the punitive process with its absent defendant, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry, the quarterly Hunt, the Forest as it re-asserts itself. Then the Institute is galvanised by the discovery of a breeding pair of a rare moth species in a country in the throes of a military coup. The Institute in turn is riven by competing ambitions—the scientific specialists trying to save the moths, the Players trying to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement… Hollowmen is an intricate and unsettling work, its shifting, interleaved...

Corrbofinn. A place where things are… different. Where Jessica Quill has inherited a house and land. And where she has just become the number one suspect in the murder of local wide boy Tony Millar. Jessica's life has entered uncharted waters. A job she hates, a cheating partner, her unexpected inheritance, and the final straw: tripping over a corpse in the rain when she comes to rural Ireland to arrange the sale of her property. But Herne's Acre is no ordinary place. It’s a key crossing-point on the borderlands between the mortal world and the otherworlds of the sidhe. And now it is to be sold by a stranger unfamiliar with the true nature of Corrbofinn, a source of considerable anxiety for Thornapple, that very civil servant of the Borderlands Commission. Bewildered, grumpy, and armed only with knowledge of toxic plants and classic detective stories, Jessica pursues her own inquiries...