I loved writing this book, which is, really, my homage to the pirate and sailing stories I grew up with and discovered later in my teens and 20s. Things like Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, and, as I mentioned already, Black Sails, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Cutthroat Island, and Hook. I’ve included a few Easter egg references to some of these stories in BBS (and later books in the series, so keep your eye open for those). Did you spot any?

I had so much fun, in fact, that I actually laughed evilly to myself while writing some scenes. (Particularly the weapons check scene, which is one of my favourites!) And I hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I did writing it. If you do and you have a couple of minutes, it would really help me out if you were able to pop a really quick review on up Amazon and/or Goodreads—it doesn’t have to be long, just a sentence or two is fine. It’s the number of reviews that seems to be most important in helping encourage Amazon to show the book to other readers.

At the time of writing (April 2020), we’re about a week out from the book releasing, but I’ve been getting feedback and reviews on Goodreads from advance readers. The reviews have all been great (Yay!), but one or two people aren’t keen on Vice or aren’t sure of her yet.

And I’m not entirely surprised by that. She’s flawed, she’s prickly, and she makes some terrible decisions, as you’ve seen.

But she’s also affectionate, determined, ferociously loyal to her friends, and, really, doing the best she can with her personal traumas. Isn’t that what we all do in life?

I really wanted to write about an imperfect heroine—someone who’s scarred (and sometimes scared), who uses humour and glibness as defence, and who has a lot of room for improvement. If you’ve read Across Dark Seas, you’ll have seen how some of her less pleasant/more destructive behaviours are coping mechanisms.

So, yes, she’s great at lying to herself (I think she’s almost convinced herself that she doesn’t have feelings for Knigh!), but I hope you can see that isn’t the whole picture and that a path to growth lies ahead of her.

Also, like a lot of women in 2020, Vice has had enough. And she’s definitely over following rules set by a man’s world. So, she’s not going to apologise for knowing what she wants and going after it.