Jim McDermott

New: (published on 7 January 2026): 'A Scourge of Relics': when a crusade fails, how do men without wealth or power return home, and at what cost? A 12th Century murder mystery.

Jim McDermott's earlier novels feature Otto Fischer, an invalided Luftwaffe officer and former Stettin detective. They commenced with 'The Peenemünde Deceptions' (2013), followed by 'The Deaths of Berlin' (2014), 'A German Winter' (2015), 'The Lie Division' (2016), 'Siege Works' (2017), 'All Traitors' Day' (2018), 'A Dragging of Chains' (2019), 'Bright New World' (2020), 'A Political Man' (2020), 'Working the Dead' (2021), 'Death, Lies and Otto' (2022) and 'Shaving the Bear' (2024). All are available in Kindle/tablet and paperback formats.

He is also the author of 'Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer' (Yale University Press, 2001: winner of the Keith Matthews Prize from the Canadian Nautical Research Society, 2001 and short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, 2001); 'The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island, 1578' (Hakluyt Society, 2001); 'England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel' (Yale UP, 2005); and 'British Military Service Tribunals, 1916 - 1918: A very much abused body of men' (Manchester UP, July 2011).

The author lives in rural Northamptonshire. He reads little that isn't research material, destroys a pair of walking-boots every three months or so, listens to music (classical, jazz and a little of what rocked his boat in the early '70s) and devises cunning strategies to avoid writing every next chapter, undertaking emergency household repairs and addressing the involuntary re-wilding that was once his garden.

A small correction: contrary to what certain literary websites will have you believe, he is not Canadian (spiffing though that race indubitably is), but a Brit, b&b.