Green Snakes, Quarantine, & a Melee of Mages

So, look, I know it’s book chat day. And I am going to talk about a book. Well, a bit.

Mostly, though, I’m going to talk about green snakes and the naming of them, but that totally relates to books. And not just because Green Snake is a character in the Gobbelino London books. No, there’s more to it than that. Which you’ll discover if you watch the video (see what I did there? That was a flawless segue into the video, right? Maybe? Eh).

I do, of course, have other books to chat about, since the trip home to NZ always necessitates the reading (and sometimes DNF-ing) of many books. But it’s really hard to focus on them when A Melee of Mages is out this Friday, and I’m immensely excited to be sharing the newest adventures of Gobs and Callum (and Green Snake) with you.

This Friday. This Friday. At which point I will also be out of the quarantine hotel and able to go and celebrate with a nice chai latte on oat milk, at an actual cafe. Maybe even in the sun, if the weather cooperates. And likely with cake. In fact, almost certainly.

This is how I party, people.

Now, you don’t have to listen to this short story. If you’re a newsletter subscriber you may have already read it anyway, and if you pick up a copy of A Melee of Mages you’ll find a link in the back so you can pop over and read it from there. But then you’ll miss out on me mispronouncing the names of my own books and not being able to find the start of the story, so it’s just not the same, is it?

And now I will get out of the way and let you get on with a little video watching (or listening). And I apologise for the blinding whiteness of the room. It really doesn’t seem that bright in real life, but now I’m looking at in the video I seem to be sitting in some sort of spa? Which I wasn’t. The quarantine hotel is nice enough, but a spa it is not. Despite the fact that it’s in Rotorua and I can smell the hot springs the whole time …

Watch on, lovely people!

And, of course, if you’d like to read the first two chapters of A Melee of Mages, you can do that – chapter one is right here, and a link to chapter two is at the bottom of the page.

Or you can go right ahead and nab your pre-order in ebook or paperback here. And then you’ll have the tale of Green Snake too. Which did start life as a newsletter-exclusive short story, of which there will be more – irregularly, admittedly, but they will keep coming! So you may want to get yourself on the newsletter if you haven’t already – jump across to sign up here, and you’ll get a collection of feline-themed short stories, plus more free stories sent through over the next few weeks.

Now, over to you, lovely people – would you ever consider having a resident snake? Have you ever had a resident snake? Or it that a hard, hard no for you? Let me know your snake-related thoughts below!

(And, as mentioned in the vid, if you’ve not started the Gobbelino series yet, here’s the link to book one – enjoy!)

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“We’ll do it,” Callum said.

“Of course we will,” I said. “Why would we not stalk the scary magician who might be trying to raise his son from the dead? For free?”

Like it or not, when a sorcerer asks you to track a magician, you track a magician. It’s that or spend life as a hamster. So we did.

But, turns out, the scary magician is the least of our worries. Between raging squirrel mobs, My Little Ravenous sewer monsters, and bungalow-dwelling necromancers with a good line in attack dogs, it’s all we can do to keep ourselves the right side of dead.

And that’s before we stumble onto something far more sinister. Something that makes one dead son look like small carrots. Something that’s going to raise an ancient almost-god and bring the world to its knees.

Unless G&C London, Yorkshire’s premier magical PIs – well, only magical PIs – can stop it first.

We definitely should’ve charged for this one…

Get your copy now!

Book 4, Gobbelino London, green snake, melee of mages, short story, video