New Book Deal!

An end. And a new beginning. 

   Paul Read is dead. 

   I’ve been writing spy fiction under the name Paul Warner for a few years now and Paul Warner can officially announce a two book publishing deal with the mighty Zaffre books.

   A Spy in the Blood will be hitting bookstores in January 2026 in hardback, followed by its mass market paperback in the summer. Funeral for a Spy will appear in hardback in January 2027, with the paperback again succeeding it that summer. There’s an option for a third, but let’s see how those two beauties sell first, eh?

   I’ll be ramping up the Paul Warner publicity over the next six months. Paul Read hasn’t been a brand I’ve publicised for a while and I’ve fallen away from social media pretty hard recently but it feels good to be back with a new persona and some mature works I’m excited to share with the world. My juvenalia, otherwise known as Blame and The Art Teacher are still available but their author presumably disappeared into Borges’ Library of Babel, unlikely to be seen again in our universe.

   So in January you’ll be able to meet Mark Wolfe, once the greatest spy of his generation, whose family know him as a quiet, affable civil servant with no idea how to use the TV remote. He still works for MI6, helping to recruit new agents, fending off advances from private security companies who offer a far higher salary than Vauxhall House, though Mark hasn’t got his hands dirty since the spying game involved dead-dropping intel beneath railway station clocks in East Berlin, Czechoslovakia and other foreign lands that no longer exist. 

   You’ll also get to meet his daughter Jody, his son Brandon, his wife Alessia, and a whole host of other characters, both malignant and benign, who help to throw the close-to-retiring Mark into a terrifying new world of modern espionage. It’s even got a plot and everything. 

   And, look, I’ve had a new author profile photo taken, by the very talented Nick Hayles. 

   There’ll be a Paul Warner website in the coming weeks and this one will be archived/burnt to the ground. There’ll be Instagram. There’ll be X. There’ll be all sorts of bother.

   But Paul Read would like to say thank you, for the last time. For your support and company over the wilderness years when it probably seemed like nothing much was happening but I was writing like mad in the background, finding a new agent, a new publisher, a new genre, a new name. 

   I can’t wait to begin this new journey and hope you’ll come along for the ride too.

   It’s my birthday today. That’s not a pretentious metaphor. It actually is my birthday. But it’s also the day I’m announcing my rebirth of sorts so, yeah, fine, it’s a pretentious metaphor, just to prove I haven’t grown up completely. 

   See you all very soon.

   Paul (Warner)