About Me
I’m John, and I wrote the Alex Rourke series of books put out through Penguin in the UK and Commonwealth, and in various translations elsewhere. If you’re in the States, only the first book, WINTER’S END, was ever picked up, by St Martin’s Press. I know from previous correspondence that most people arrive here trying to find later books in the series, or with one of a couple of common questions. If you’re looking for something else, feel free to email me at namelesshorror [at] gmail [dot] com – I’m lousy at replying promptly, or at all, but I’ll try to respond – or, if you want more chance of success at the price of a 140 character limit, through a message to my Twitter account.
Q: I’m in the US, I didn’t hate WE enough to put me off the others, but I can’t find them. Help!
A: Your best bet is to get a copy of the other ones from import stores. If you search AbeBooks for them, you should have some luck. They round up listings from dozens of smaller stores. Be aware, though, that they’re not exactly easy to get here either, so if you can’t get them…
Q: I’m in the UK, I managed to struggle through all four of the books and I was wondering if there are going to be any more?
A: “No, there aren’t,” is the short answer. There’s a story behind it, but I’ve changed identity, publisher and style of story. If you head over to seancregan.com you should be able to find out about the first of the new books, THE LEVELS, and maybe more about all sorts of things (I don’t plan on keeping this brief FAQ wildly up to date, so for all I know by the time you read this, that link will be full of mail order Russian brides or unconvincing celebrity sex videos). Will you like the Cregan books if you liked the old ones? It depends. They are very different. Far better, if you ask me, but certainly not to everyone’s taste. I’d suggest reading a sample (if there’s one there), or taking a punt on one when it comes out or at the library.
Books
A dozen people trapped in a roadhouse during a storm, three corpses buried in a field, and a good chance no one's going to make it through the night alive. Burial Ground is the last Alex Rourke novel.
One mistake. Seven years of a child's life. In The Darkness Inside, Alex finds out the missing kid in a case he worked on in his FBI days may not have been killed after all. And that the man he crossed the line to put away may not have worked alone.
A single bullet blows Alex's world to pieces. He finds himself in the strange Vermont town of Bleakwater Ridge trying to piece together what's happened, alone except for the dead and The Touch Of Ghosts.
A silent murder suspect, caught red-handed at the scene, draws former FBI agent Alex Rourke back to his home town of Winter's End in northern Maine. But it soon becomes clear that there's far more to the place, and to his own past, than he ever realised.
Short Fiction
Wish, featuring gay Nazis and the terror of living urban myth, appears in the Ken Bruen-edited Dublin Noir, as well as in 2008's Best British Mysteries anthology.
Twenty Dollar Future, about the tragic making of a child soldier in east Africa, appears in Jen Jordan's Expletive Deleted anthology.