Book 1: Walking the Knife’s Edge
It’s hard to focus on your studies when you’re from the wrong side of town, your dad’s an abusive prick and classmates are intimidated by your skills at hand to hand combat. But for Rarkin, getting into Sythe School means monsters, the chance to contain ones that stray into human occupied zones, and the opportunity to do something meaningful with his life. Even better; it includes an Electric Way pass out of town and travel beyond city limits.
Rarkin seizes his chance at his dream job with everything he’s got, forcing down traumatic memories to focus on work he knows he could love. But it’s a dangerous time to be holding everything in, to have little contact with friends like brothers, or to be keeping new friends at arm’s length.
Sythe’s nemesis, Organised Crime is no longer playing by the ‘rules,’ and Rarkin and his classmates are on the front line. Organised Crime’s bold new tactics tear at the bandages of Rarkin’s unhealed wounds and his unresolved CPTSD.
To be the person Rarkin doesn’t believe people saying he can be, he must change his toxically masculine approach to emotions, and break the cycle of violence in his family. If he doesn’t make peace with his past and stop fighting EVERYTHING, he’s on the road to self destruction. In working for Sythe; Rarkin is Walking the Knife’s Edge.
Representation
Rarkin’s toxic masculinity and his black and white, autistic mode of thinking are a bad combination, but his autistic tendency to logically puzzle things out might just save him. He has CPTSD, is asexual and pan-romantic questioning.
Secondary character rep includes: sapphic, dyslexic, asexual, gay and a gender identity journey.
Content Warnings
These include; family violence and child abuse (graphic in chapter’s 3, 4 and 24), family dysfunction, CPTSD and some homophobic, sexist/ misogynistic etc refs. (Healing is a BIG part of of Rarkin’s character ark.)
Add it to your TBR
Pre-order on… (Out Sept 24)
Buying direct from me means you get a DRM-free epub file, and I get a little more profit from each ebook sale.
Connection to Ruarnon Trilogy
This series is set in the same world as Ruarnon Trilogy, 3,000 years later. The schools Teliph founds have become a global organisation of magical education, monster and emergency services training. Though Umarinaris has regressed into (modern) city states, Sythe is international, as is its nemesis; Organised Crime.
Book 2: Countering the Hands of Crime
Rarkin has formed a Syther Team with three of his classmates. It should be easy enough; containing low level monsters for Monster Containment. But Rarkin’s doing it with the additional challenge of needing to learn to trust his team completely, to somehow let down the walls he’s had up for self preservation, after fifteen years of being raised by an abusive father.
Just as he’s beginning to make progress, a new classmate joins the team. She’s surprisingly capable in all areas, for a ‘new student,’ particularly in magic wielding. Rarkin suspects Milahara has serious secrets of her own. But he’s barely begun to gauge her true capacity when their team begins working under far from normal conditions.
Not only is crime boss Mavon still at large, he’s as clever and capable as Rarkin suspected, and less than half as rational. Worse, a second crime boss has gone rogue. Between the two of them, Sythe’s resources are stretched thin, and Rarkin finds his team taking on missions they’re barely experienced enough to handle, at the very edge of their monster containing and fledgling magical capabilities.
But Rarkin and his team’s external danger this time isn’t getting caught on the front lines of Sythe’s struggle against crime bosses. Its Sythe being caught in the crossfire, as two rival crime bosses utilise every black market magical and monstrous means their vast illegal trade networks make available, in an all-out war against each other.
Progress
Countering the Hands of Crime’s cover is already being digitally painted by my cover artist. I will be seeking beta readers in October.
I’m aiming to release it April 2026.
Add it to your TBR
Pre-order on… (Out April 16, 2026)
