My Vancouver jaunt is but a distant happy memory. My sleep patterns have returned to normal. My taste buds are in hibernation. I’m regular again. And my respiratory condition (known locally as Istanbul lung) is back.

This week I’ve knuckled down to some serious and intense work on Particular Stupidities R&M#5. I’m feeling confident that it hangs together well and that it is a worthy addition to the R&M Files. That’s really as much as I can ever hope for from new books in the series. I’ve been through it a couple of times and other than tightening up a sentence here and a paragraph there and fixing those English errors that I can see I don’t honestly know what else I can do with it. I’m a little concerned to be so… satisfied with it so quickly because usually I feel the need to go through my books at least five times before I’m approaching happy with them. It’s strangely worrisome that I feel good about it with so few run throughs.

Maybe I’ll leave it a week and read it again. Just to be sure.

I’ve been working on the blurb too:

The Particular Stupidities that blight Mankind litter this fifth Romney and Marsh File, which sees Dover CID taken to the outskirts of their jurisdiction, the edge of reason and the verge of self-destruction.

The sea and country air of the district has competition in this criminal study in aromatherapy. The pong of putrefied remains, the distillation of duplicity, the odour of opposition and the infusion of inanity combine to produce a pungent bouquet to clear the most congested of blocked nasal passages.

A rotting corpse is discovered in one of Kent’s old coal mining communities. In their search to uncover the identities of the victim and those responsible for the death and concealment of the body DI Romney and his team must confront and deal with issues of prejudice, bias, loyalty and betrayal (and that’s just amongst themselves).