Three fiction series are under way, each at a different stage. Here is what each one is, and where it stands.
Migrant: A Libyan Storm (The Storm Series, Book I)
An action-packed military and geopolitical thriller.
Lagos. Ebimie Abari has the house, the family, and the future his powerful patron promised him. Then one morning his patron is dead, and Ebimie is the only key to a fortune and a set of secrets that dangerous men will kill for.
He runs with his family: down the Niger, across the Sahara, into the lawless camps of Libya where people are bought and sold. Behind them comes Obi Nwakaeme, the Butcher, who never stops.
Out on the Mediterranean, an ageing Irish patrol ship answers a distress call. In Malta, John Carroll, a man who keeps his past buried, gets a call he cannot ignore. When the storm breaks, Irish sailors and soldiers are tested to their limits, far from home, for people the world would rather forget.
All it takes to face the storm is everything you have.
Status, autumn 2026: the manuscript is finished: 68 chapters, around 96,000 words. It goes to beta readers in November 2026, and to literary agents in early January 2027. Book II is a partial draft. Follow the Storm Series.
The Vastus Annals, Book I (as Karol Barry)
High fantasy with a grimdark edge.
Magic has drained from the world of Vastus. The Great Dragons are gone, the Gods half-forgotten, and the Western Kingdoms spend their soldiers like coin on an endless frontier war.
Lucas Miller, a card cheat from Reedbywater, is caught and sentenced to twenty-five years in the penal Legion. Keta, an orphan thief, finds that the rat and the raven she runs with will do what she asks, and the city starts whispering witch. A young prince rides to the front believing the stories he was taught. Far to the east, in the lands of the Arkanin, a reckless shaman performs an old rite, and this time something answers.
The West holds by margins and blood, not destiny.
Status, autumn 2026: Book I of a planned trilogy is in development, with a full chapter outline. Chapter One, Cheaters Never Prosper, was published in Bard of the Isles in December 2020. Read Chapter One and explore the world.
The Cataclysm (Shattered Gates, Book I, as Karol Barry)
Science fiction space opera.
Humanity has crossed the stars before, and lost it all. Its oldest stories survive only in fragments: a sister moon whose arrival drowned the world, and the Wanderer, the death of worlds, which tore through the settled planets and swallowed Telmark in a single flare seen in every sky.
Now the scattered worlds of humankind have drifted apart, each its own civilisation, each certain of its own history. Only the Chroniclers remember how fragile that history is.
Down in the smoke and the giant ferns of a hostile world, Trooper Katinos and his company are about to learn what the briefings left out.
Status, autumn 2026: early chapters and world-building. Read an early extract, The Chronicler.
Non-fiction and academic
Book chapters and papers on the Defence Forces and security policy are listed on the Academic Publications page. Sergeant Bourgogne: The Last March is about the last book my father was working on before he died, and the campaigns Sergeant Bourgogne endured.
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