What it is
Pantheon is a romantic conspiracy thriller, the first of three books, written as a novel: close third person, past tense, one point of view per chapter. A woman has built a life so completely that it became real to her, and a Hong Kong businessman's pursuit of her turns from conquest into a costly act of trust, in a season where being known is more dangerous than being found. The book is finished, 63 chapters, and it publishes on 1 November 2026 as a Kindle ebook, in Kindle Unlimited from release day, and as a paperback the same day.
The paperback comes out with the ebook, and a hardcover will follow later. Cover illustration by Jryona.
Watch
The cover reveal, and three scenes from the book.
Watch / Cover reveal1 / 4
Listen
The book has a song: a duet, his verses saying what he wants and hers only what she does. Five more songs written alongside it make up the album Pantheon (The Beginning).
Listen / Every song from the book
Where it came from
Mystery and suspense are what I read and watch by default: crime, investigation, and the spy and assassination stories where the tension sits in what one person can afford to let another person know. Pantheon began as a love letter to all of it. What finally made me write it was finishing 007 First Light and wanting, straight away, to build something with that shape in it.
It took a few false starts to get here. A witch RPG, and a couple of other projects that did not survive their first weeks. What I kept coming back to was the same wish: a body of fiction where separate stories can eventually reach one another and grow, instead of a shelf of unrelated titles. Perpetūra was the first half of that answer. Pantheon is what happened when the same working method, the cast and the whole route written down before any prose, was pointed at a thriller. The two turned out to suit each other better than expected.
The other thing I wanted was a cast that nobody has sorted into good and bad in advance. Almost no one in this book is only one thing, and what a reader decides about any of them should come from what they have actually read, not from a label attached in the first chapter.
The idea
The idea underneath the plot is simple to say and harder to live: being loved requires being seen, and for her, being seen is the one risk she has never been able to take. The book follows what happens when someone starts to see her anyway, and whether conquest can become something else once it costs the person doing the pursuing.
The reading experience
The website carries a free sample: the opening chapters of Act I in a web reader, with adjustable typography, free to read with no sign-up and nothing to claim.