It was a great pleasure to be at the (belated) launch party of Gianfranco Munerotto’s Navi della marina veneziana at the Mare di Carta bookshop last Friday. Now, I must declare an interest here as I provided the English language translations for this, but this really is a beautifully produced piece of work. Gianfranco has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Venetian maritime history and what he doesn’t know, frankly, is probably not worth knowing. He’s also an extremely talented artist, and possesses a fine bass-baritone voice to boot. In fact, if he wasn’t such a nice bloke I’d be very jealous.

Elsewhere, the ebook edition of The Venetian Game is currently available at a bargain price, with a correspondingly satisfying spike in Amazon sales. I get asked to talk about it at school a fair bit which manage to be both fun and a bit embarrassing at the same time. There’ll also be an audiobook version later this year : no more information on that at present, but I’ll post it as and when I get it.

And then, of course, there’s Vengeance in Venice which comes out on the 5th April. Which is just slightly more than two months away now or (not that I’m counting) something like 70 sleeps.

Fingers crossed but, hopefully, it’s going to be a busy year…