Managing Death comes out in a few weeks, and it’s the perfect escape from a cold winter. I’ve never known an icy Christmas season, in Australia things are reversed, and heat is the order of the day.

As we head towards Christmas in Brisbane things start to heat up, the air shimmers with heat and humidity as though the sky itself is sweating. Dark clouds build on the horizon in the afternoon and tremendous storms strike the city, cooling everything down, but only briefly.

The summer sun, when it returns, beats down remorselessly and with all the water in the air you sometimes feel like you’re walking in soup. Everything is green, loud with crickets and cicadas, life everywhere and vital.

The day grows hotter and stiller and soupier until you think you can’t stand it any more and then, dark clouds again, a cool breeze racing ahead of them, and blessed relief.

This Summer has already been our wettest in decades, and I must have been a little prescient because that’s just the sort of Summer that my poor protag, Steven de Selby, has to contend with, though he does have some other troubles, too. Lots of them.

There’s a mad god, an even madder thing called the Hungry Death, an ex-employee intent on his death, a meeting of the World’s 13 Deaths, oh, and his relationship with the lovely Lissa Jones is under threat. You don’t have a whirlwind romance – filled with death and destruction – without there being some fallout. And this book is all about the fallout from Death Most Definite.

The sun blazes, storms are furious, the whole city sweats, and the body count is high, but by the end of this book Steve will have learnt some terrifying stuff about the nature of Death, and just how hard it is to manage.

I’ve put everything into this book to make it as fast and exciting a read as I could without neglecting Steve’s relationship with Lissa or the weird dark world in which Steven lives (and no, I’m not talking about Brisbane).

I can’t wait to see what people think.