Brendan McDonald

Love can be a truly terrible thing. Marriages are tricky at the best of times especially when one of you is dead.

Vincent Banecroft the irascible editor of The Stranger Times has never believed his wife died despite emphatic evidence to the contrary. Now against all odds it seems he may actually be proved right; but what lengths will he go to in an attempt to rescue her? With Banecroft distracted the shock resignation of assistant editor Hannah Willis couldn't have come at a worse time. It speaks volumes that her decision to reconcile with her philandering ex-husband is only marginally less surprising than Banecroft and his wife getting back together. In this time of crisis is her decision to swan off to a fancy new-age retreat run by a celebrity cult really the best thing for anyone? As if that wasn't enough one of the paper's ex-columnists has disappeared a particularly impressive trick seeing as he never existed in the first place.

Floating statues hijacked ghosts homicidal cherubs irate starlings Reliant Robins and quite possibly several deeply sinister conspiracies; all-in-all a typical week for the staff of The Stranger Times.

Stella is enjoying life as an almost student, or at least she is until a man falls from the sky right in front of her, leaving a big old hole in the pavement for Manchester Council to fill. The obvious question of how he ended up in the sky in the first place has no obvious answers, which is where The Stranger Times come in. This isn't just the hunt for another story though. Dark powers think Stella might have been involved and the only way she and the team can prove her innocence is to find out what the hell is really going on. What have dodgy gear, disturbed graves and a decommissioned rock star got to do with all this?

Book 4 in the Stanger Times series.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

For most people, that means a time of celebration, relaxation and inebriation, but not for the staff of The Stranger Times. While a book club meeting ending in a triple murder isn't unprecedented, it is at least noteworthy. It quickly emerges that this is no ordinary book-club-triple-murder either, as it features a librarian possessed by a chaotic entity who has broken through from another dimension and is hellbent on vengeance. He's made a list, but he's not checking it twice as the whole of humanity is on it.

As if that wasn't enough to be dealing with, a shocking revelation about a member of The Stranger Times team's past brings family together, but not in a way that's ever going to make it into a Hallmark movie.

Book 3 in the Stranger Times series.

It's a night just like any other in the Conister home - but then Paul heads upstairs and never comes back. When his wife Maggie goes to see where he is, she can't find him. His phone and wallet are by the bed. The windows are locked from the inside. Paul has vanished. Missing persons investigator David Raker is an expert in locating the lost. So when he's hired by Maggie, he knows that in every disappearance - however impossible it seems - there's an answer. What he doesn't know yet is that his search for Paul Conister will become linked to three other mysteries . . . A night patrolman on the London Underground makes a deadly discovery. A cold case is reopened - but the key witness appears to no longer exist. And thousands of miles away, a random shooting may not be random at all. David Raker is key to unlocking the truth . . .

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable. At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got problems of her own.

When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they'd previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.