For the past year or so I have been party to a small publishing secret. Juliet McKenna has a secret identity as JM Alvey, a mild mannered writer of crime novels set in ancient Greece.

It’s not a very serious secret. Anyone who has turned up to an Alvey signing will have spotted who is writing the books, and if you checked out where Alvey’s website is hosted you might put two and two together. But in the wild and whacky world of publishing such subtefuge is often necessary to persuade bookstores to stock volumes by an author whose recent sales have been less that stellar.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons that Juliet doesn’t want to dwell upon, Mx Alvey’s career seems to have come to a premature end. Consequently she’s free to write about it, and if today’s social media is anything to go by that’s lead to an immediate increase in interest in the books. I know that Juliet has many fans out there, including some who would pay good money for a shopping list if she’d written it. I’m happy to add to getting the world out now that I can.