When I was much younger there were a number of famous authors whose books I loved to read. I used to anxiously scan the book shops (of which there were a lot more in those days) for news that each of their latest books had just been published so that I could get them at the earliest opportunity. There were quite a few of them, but my favourites among these authors were:-

Hammond Innes
Mary Stewart
Neville Shute
Desmond Bagley

Their novels often took the reader to faraway places. The hero or heroine was usually a fairly normal everyday person trying to lead a normal life and earn enough money to keep their head above water. They weren´t the impossible James Bond type of person who would naturally beat everyone else who they came up against. And usually there was a potential amorous partner there with whom they would walk happily off into the sunset with when they had triumphed over the bad guys.

This may sound boring but the authors managed to bring enough variety into the settings, the different conditions, the complexity of the plots and the interest in the characters to make each read a pleasure. Of course some of the books were better than others and some you wouldn´t choose to read again. But generally you got enough enjoyment from the read to remain faithful to the writer and want to try his next publication.

Nowadays it seems to me that all the interest is in series where the same main character confronts a number of different obstacles and wins out in each book. I am not denigrating this kind of authorship. I´m sure many of the books are very well written and deserve to be successes. But, to my mind, they do not have the same variety of characters or the satisfying conclusion to the story which I like to read about. I also feel the suspension of belief in the reader is more difficult in those series.

So what I am attempting to do is to return to the type of novels which Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley and the others wrote, although of course with a more modern twist. The plots are set in more modern conflicts. The characters are (I hope) more up to date. The romance element is more descriptive. And I try to make the conclusions less foreseeable – although I accept that I will not succeed with all readers.

That is why, to satisfy the modern requirement for books to be grouped in a series, I have decided to create the Adventure, Mystery, Romance (AMR) Series although the same main characters do not usually appear in all the books (an exception is The Secret of the Cathars and The Templar Legacy) and the plots vary greatly.