STEVE HARDING

A London crime novel

BADBLOOD

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

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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.

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Synopses, manuscript extracts & development notes.

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Urban fantasySympathy for the DevilSteve Harding

Urban fantasy · Mythological

H. Rider Haggard’s She meets Anaïs Nin.

Sympathy for the Devil

Some appetites outlive empires.

Current status · Seeking representation

Synopsis

Sympathy for the Devil follows Shamhat, ancient, immortal, moving through millennia armed with beauty, seduction, and violence in whatever combination the moment calls for.

It starts in Babylon, 4300 BCE. Shamhat, a princess, steals a forbidden tablet rumoured to hold power no human should touch, and in doing so unleashes a sinister, entity that had been bound inside the temple for longer than anyone remembers. The theft changes her too, mortal woman sliding into something older, capturing her abnormal beauty. Centuries later she resurfaces in Monaco, a high-stakes card player working the glittering rot of casinos and nightclubs and elite social circles, always trailing violence, always several moves ahead of the room.

A private coven of immortal imps serves her every desire. Her closest confidante, Astrid, a mortal, stays at her side while Shamhat draws a rotating cast of men into her orbit, chief among them Jack, whose entanglement with her drags him into a world of supernatural intrigue he never saw coming. Enemy, lover, pawn, kept in the dark right up until the end, guided in part by the enigmatic Professor.

The hunt for the tablet, and the forces still hunting it back, pulls Shamhat through secret contacts, underworld clubs that resemble Hell a little too closely, and a network of allies and enemies whose loyalties never sit still long enough to trust. Blending mythology, eroticism, and violence, Sympathy for the Devil traces her long game across centuries, power taken, enemies discarded, a truth about what she really is that the people circling her are only just starting to glimpse. And when that truth finally lands, it changes everything.

More than six thousand years ago Shamhat opened a door that should have stayed shut, and everything since has been the long game of a woman who has never told anyone what she’s playing for. By the time the truth lands, you’ll have spent the whole book on her side. Then you get to decide what that says about you.

Think ‘She who must be obeyed’ H. Rider Haggard meets Anaïs Nin. An ageless, commanding woman moving through centuries of desire and destruction, half myth, half erotic confession.

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