A Note from Pete – October 2026

October 2026 · Issue No. 3

Hi there

Welcome to the October newsletter. What a month it has been.

It started with the BookBub Featured Deal for A Detective's Dilemma in August, which finished with 15,285 downloads. Then came the deal for A Minister's Downfall in September, which passed 10,000 downloads in the first ten hours. Put the two together and more than 31,000 new readers have now picked up a Tom Kessler book. Thank you to everyone who downloaded one, and a warm welcome to those of you who have joined the list along the way.

The part I am happiest about is that paid sales have rocketed. Free downloads are lovely, but readers who go on to buy the next book are what keep this going.

Some authors forget that being a writer is also a business, and it needs to be treated as one. My saying is this: anyone can make a widget for a dollar and sell it for 90 cents. The secret is making it for 90 cents and selling it for a dollar. Every promotion I run has to earn its place on that basis, and September showed what happens when the numbers line up.

FROM THE CASE FILES

There are some jobs you remember because of what happened. Others stick because of when they happened.

This one was both.

It was Christmas Eve 1990. The Old Stillage stood on Chertsey Road in Woking, a busy town-centre pub that, on Christmas Eve, was full of people doing what people do on Christmas Eve.

Then an argument broke out over a pint of beer.

By the time it was over, 26-year-old Kenneth MacLean had been fatally stabbed.

Robert Warden, a 47-year-old carpenter from Woking, was arrested and charged with his murder. Contemporary reports reduced it, inevitably, to a few lines in the newspapers. A man dead. Another charged with murder. A Christmas Eve row in a pub.

For those of us working it, of course, it wasn't a few lines in a newspaper.

And Christmas Eve didn't make the slightest difference.

That Christmas was supposed to be rather special for me. It was the first one with the woman who would become my wife, and her parents had come to stay.

Then the call came.

Plans disappeared. Christmas became work.

That's one of the things about police work that doesn't often make it into crime fiction. Murders, surveillance operations and major investigations are exciting when you're reading about them. In real life they arrive when they arrive.

They don't check whether you've booked a restaurant.

They don't care that it's Christmas Eve.

And they certainly don't care that your future in-laws have just arrived.

Once you're called out, you're working. Someone has been killed and there is a job to be done. Everything else simply has to wait.

I ended up working across Christmas while the people I'd planned to spend it with got on with Christmas without me.

At the time, I doubt I thought very much about it. None of us did. It was part of the job. Your family knew what you did and, to some extent, they learned to live around it.

No mobile phones either. No quick text saying, "Still here. Don't wait up."

If you managed a telephone call, you made one. Otherwise, they waited.

Looking back more than thirty years later, I think rather differently about that side of the job.

We tend to remember the arrests, the operations and the people we were chasing. What is much easier to forget is the person sitting at home, the dinner going cold, the plans cancelled and the family learning once again that the job came first.

Kenneth MacLean lost his life that Christmas Eve. Nothing that happened to the rest of us remotely compares with that.

But the case also left me with another memory: my first Christmas with my future wife and her family, and how quickly normal life could disappear when the telephone rang.

That was policing.

You went.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON

I’m now roughly 40% of the way through Book 6, having broken off from writing it to put this newsletter together.

I’m really pleased with how it’s developing so far. The ARC Team have already been given access to the prologue and Chapter 1. Chapter 1 originally appeared at the end of A Reluctant Asset, with the prologue added afterwards. The early feedback has been very positive.

The book is currently on pre-order for 1 January 2027, but the plan is to get it to the ARC Team at the beginning of November and, if everything stays on track, publish it at the beginning of December.

More on that next month.

On the marketing side, I’ve also got another promotion running in the US from 16 to 22 October. This one has been set up through Written Word Media, a company I use regularly.

In fact, there’s a fair chance some of you reading this originally joined my subscriber list through one of their competitions, so you may already know the name.

WHAT I'M READING

I’ve listened to a couple of audiobooks this month and, if I’m honest, neither quite landed for me.

The first was An Inside Job by Daniel Silva. I’ve read or listened to the entire Gabriel Allon series over the years, but I think I may finally have reached the end of the road with it. The problem, for me, is that too many of the characters now feel almost superhuman. Everyone seems to be the best in the world at whatever they do, and I find that harder and harder to believe. Once that happens, the tension starts to disappear.

I also listened to Blood Money by Andrew Raymond, the fifth and final Novak and Mitchell book. It was perfectly readable, but it felt more like a tying-up of loose ends than a story I became heavily invested in.

What has really caught me this month is the Berrick Ford series.

Berrick Ford is actually two writers, both former police officers with a great deal of experience behind them, and it shows. The books have the kind of authenticity I always look for. The procedures, the dialogue and the way the job feels are about as convincing as anything I’ve come across.

Other than mine, obviously.

I very rarely read the first two books of a series in four days, but that’s exactly what happened here. I’m now on day five and already more than halfway through book three, Dead Reckoning.

That probably tells you everything you need to know.

OVER TO YOU

I’ve had a few emails from readers over the last month, which I always enjoy receiving. Keep them coming.

If there’s something you’d like to ask, something you’d like to see in a future newsletter, or you just want to tell me what you thought of one of the books, send it over.

I may not always get back to you straight away, particularly when I’m buried in Book 6, but I promise I’ll get to it.

All the best for another month.

Pete