STEVE HARDING

A London crime novel

BADBLOOD

Graves don’t stay shut.
Neither does the past.

Open the book

Complete manuscript · Seeking representation

01 — EXPLORE THE LIBRARY ↓THE NOVELS OF STEVE HARDING

The manuscripts

The library.

A story behind every spine.
Select a book to open it.

Bad Blood

Behind the books

Steve Harding

A little about me. I’ve been writing for twenty-five years, longer if you count the notebooks I never finished. It happened around a job, a family, a fair amount of travelling. A page or two in a hotel room. A chapter in whatever flat or house I was living in that year.

Some of these manuscripts go back to the early 2000s. A few are newer. I’ve spent the last couple of years bringing the lot of them up to scratch, and no, I don’t claim to know it all. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I’m reminded of that most mornings. But I turn up for it, every day, the way you’d turn up for a job you actually wanted.

More about Steve

None of this happened alone.

A retired Metropolitan Police murder detective went through my crime novels and told me, without much ceremony, where I’d got the procedure wrong. Between him, a handful of beta readers I trust, and a few others, every book left the process stronger than I could have made it on my own.

Thank you for stopping by. I hope you find something here worth staying for.

Occasional correspondence

Keep in touch.

For literary agents.

Synopses, manuscript extracts & development notes.

Enter the agent area
Spy fictionRileySteve Harding

Spy fiction · Psychological thriller

Bond-level ruthlessness with Villanelle’s appetite for the work.

Riley

Working title

She doesn’t break under pressure. She applies it.

Current status · Seeking representation

Synopsis

Riley is very good at her job, which is exactly why her own side is almost as scared of her as her enemies are. Western intelligence’s most effective operative feared for what she can extract and what she’s willing to do to get it.

The book opens in London, mid-overkill, before shipping her to the Middle East for an interrogation that lays out, what Riley is capable of and what the job has already cost her. From there the plot widens fast. A mysterious power broker known only as London. An enemy operative, Dmitri, whose capture of Riley forces her to survive imprisonment on nothing but training and will.

There’s a life beyond the missions, thin as it is. A disabled sister gives her rare domestic moments. Theo, loyal and quick-witted, whose feelings for her complicate everything they already have to navigate together. Then the stakes go geopolitical. A shadowy AI system called Lucifer capable of bending global markets and destabilising governments from the inside out, and Riley’s personal war becomes something much bigger than personal.

Brutal action, bodies piled high, high-society espionage, financial conspiracy, and debauchery at all levels. Riley gets pushed to the edge of her own humanity, interrogator, killer, spy, survivor, in a fight where duty and monstrosity keep blurring into each other and the real enemy might dwarf any single target she’s ever been sent after. Her coping mechanisms swing wild, a ruthless predator one moment, submissive plaything the next.

Riley has never met anyone she couldn’t break. Lucifer isn’t anyone. It doesn’t feel pressure, it can’t be interrogated, and it’s already inside the systems her own side trusts. The most feared operative in the West is going to war with something she can’t scare, can’t bribe and can’t break. The more she becomes what it takes to fight it, the less anyone, Riley included, can say which of them is the weapon.

A female operative with Bond-level ruthlessness and Villanelle’s appetite for the work, dropped into a globe-spanning financial-warfare plot.

A brief synopsis, intended to give the flavour of the book. Not a full or final summary, and subject to revision.