Thriller writer, archaeologist and traveller
I'm currently working on both a heavyweight archaeology textbook and a new archaeology mystery series, so it felt like an apt moment to look back at my own career. This involved some crawling around the loft looking for old photographs from the age before digital photography. The earliest dig photographs include my laying in my... Continue Reading →
Tax Havens: How Islands Have Reinvented Themselves For Millenia I had the pleasure of being interviewed by podcaster Ollie Guillou for his series 'What We Did Before'. It was an hour of off-the cuff conversation about the last 10,000 years of Guernsey's history and how the tides of history have washed by the islands. Edited... Continue Reading →
People occasionally ask 'what's the most exciting thing you've ever discovered? I used to have to think back a decade or two, but no longer. It was last month, May 2026. This year's dig is over and I'm home, fully scrubbed clean, with bruises and scrapes fading. My friends and I have been digging on... Continue Reading →
Writing a book is hugely enjoyable, but a with anything worthwhile is also an immense challenge. I'm very close to the end of work on what's turned into a labour of love and the final stages require both patience and attention to detail. Our team of archaeological volunteers has worked on the island of Alderney... Continue Reading →
November is not a great time to travel, with most places being in transition between seasons. I figured Belize should be coming to the end of its rainy season when I set off on a two week trip, starting on 23 November (an auspicious date for anyone paying attention). Didn't quite get it right but... Continue Reading →
Long time, no blog, as the year has ended in a flurry of travelling. Just like most of 2025, in fact. I spent around 120 nights away from home, splitting the year more or less into equal thirds of writing, archaeology and travel. January was mostly spent recovering from the flu, but following the successful... Continue Reading →
The Report on the excavation of a Late Roman building on Alderney which I directed in 2024 has been published in the latest Alderney Society Bulletin. The projects run by our team in Alderney have, since 2008, been written up straight away and an interim report has featured in the next Bulletin. Reports on archaeological... Continue Reading →
Archaeological digs often feature in novels, or are portrayed on films or documentaries such as Digging for Britain. But if you imagine your own job portrayed in a seven minute TV slot, or serving as part of the backdrop of fiction you'll realise how much more there must be to the real experience of volunteering... Continue Reading →
The day Blackshirt Rebellion was launched, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by crime blogger Donna Morfett. We ranged far and wide from my origin story to the Jeffrey Flint novels, then on to the Blackshirts. Then as interviews do we went off down side alleys to talk crime writing in general. The whole... Continue Reading →
It was a pleasure to be invited to the UK Crime Book Club Live event in Leeds this weekend. The convention was a consistently jolly affair, with plenty of laughs considering the grim topics under discussion. In thirty years of writing I've only spoken on five panels, so it was a double pleasure to be... Continue Reading →