John Rickards - Freelance Editor & Writer

My Books

I’ve written under both my own name and, while with Hachette, the pseudonym ‘Sean Cregan’, though I’ve since rolled everything I can back under my own. Don’t let that confuse things; I’m just this guy, y’know. (I also write a lot less than I used to because I spend most of my time editing.) Everything with an actual download button below is free, and freely shareable, while those books requiring filthy, filthy money only have store links. Email me if you have any trouble and I'll be happy to help. And thanks for checking my work out. You’re awesome.

Portal of the Gods

Step through and it can give you back everything you’ve lost, or take away everything you’ve got.

Jack Harker’s a washed-up adventure junkie with a knack for languages and getting himself in trouble. But when armed strangers break into his house looking for his parents’ old notes on the legendary lost city of Huayacapo, they inadvertently draw him into a secret war that’s been raging for a century and a half, a shadow conflict to unearth the past, and to control the future.

His enemies are after a relic of a pre-human civilization, the gateway through which the gods themselves supposedly entered the world, a door to other worlds, other times. They have other artifacts bonded to them, enhancing their abilities and extending their lives. They have relentless, inhuman servitors who obey their every command. They have limitless wealth and wield vast influence over governments and civic authorities. Jack’s only allies are revenge-driven thief Anya Martinez, his crazy uncle, and a secret group who may not even exist.

Beating them to the prize will take luck and cunning, and the race will lead from the Florida swamps to the Andean foothills to a buried Nazi facility in Antarctica.

And it’s not just the bad guys Jack and Anya have to deal with: this isn’t the first time someone’s activated the portal, and the shadows of those who tried it last could slaughter them all if the gate is opened again.

Portal of the Gods

The Touch Of Ghosts

Boston private investigator Alex Rourke has had to overcome personal tragedy and the emotional trauma it’s caused to him before. But that’s nothing to what he faces when the disappearance of a young man from a tough part of town takes him to the back country of northern Vermont. Adam Webb wasn’t the first person to vanish in this stretch of the Green Mountains, and he won’t be the last. Ghost towns, drug trafficking, blood and violence – all secrets buried beneath the stark, clean white of the January snows.

With everything Alex holds dear either taken from him or quickly slipping through his grasp, keeping his sanity – and his life – will mean getting to the root of the evil dwelling in the frozen state. If he still wants either of those things, that is…

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Or you can find The Touch Of Ghosts at the links below.

The Touch Of Ghosts

The Darkness Inside

Cody Williams was never charged with a string of child abductions and murders across New England, but everyone knows he was the man behind them. While the remains of some of his victims have been found down the years, several are still out there, buried in the Massachusetts wilds. Now Cody’s dying and the families want their children’s bodies recovered. And he’ll talk, but only to the man who put him away, former FBI agent Alex Rourke.

It’s an unpleasant task for Rourke, but it gets far worse when he finds out that one of the victims might not have been killed at all, as he and everyone else had assumed. That she might still be alive, seven years later, still held captive. That Williams might not have acted alone. That by bringing down Cody, Alex gave the true villain free rein. That he could buy the lost girl’s freedom with his own. If he was willing.

The Darkness Inside

Burial Ground

Twelve people. One night. No way out. Troubled private detective Alex Rourke comes to Tennessee mountain country on a thin lead to a past killing, the deaths covered up and unavenged. When the night comes down and people start dying, it’s not just those around him he’s looking to save in the storm-blasted valley in the middle of nowhere; he’s desperately trying to hold on to his own crumbling sanity as he teeters on the edge of a complete psychotic break.

Trapped in the run-down rest stop at the valley’s heart, killers both outside and in, nowhere safe and no one to turn to, Alex is going to have to sort the real from the imagined, truth from fiction, fast if anyone’s going to live to see morning…

Burial Ground

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned

Phil Durand is a low level functionary within one of Boston’s organized crime outfits. A delivery driver, nothing more. When his girlfriend Evie goes missing three days before they were due to leave town together to start a better, clean, life down in Florida, he turns to the only man he knows with a reputation for helping guys like him. Alex Rourke was once a respected investigator, first with the FBI and then in the private sector. Now he battles a long-term mental illness that’s seen him slide from doing respectable work to ekeing out a living helping those with no one else to turn to.

But has Evie genuinely been missing for a few days? Was she really Durand’s girlfriend? And how does what happened to the missing woman tie in to the outfit Durand works for, not to mention a rival boss in a neighboring part of town? The race is on to find Evie, find the truth, and untangle the knots in Durand’s story before one side, or another, does it for him.

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned

The Levels

On the outskirts of Newport, on the US East Coast, lies an abandoned, feral housing project, Keating Levels. Inhabited by the city’s lost and forgotten, ruled as a series of gangland fiefdoms presided over by the mysterious ‘Sorrow’, it’s a place you only go if you’ve got nowhere else left.

When ex-CIA agent Nathan Turner sees his own murder reported on the news and the only clue’s a Levels tag on his house, he’s in just that position. 16-year-old Ghost was kidnapped from her family to be turned into one of Sorrow’s personal killers but now she just wants out. It’s a different killer that brings suspended cop Kate Friedman to the Levels; unless she can find the man taking revenge on those he blames for the infection killing him, she’ll die from it too. With Ghost trying to escape Sorrow, Turner looking for answers, and Kate trying to survive, a storm’s gathering fast over the Levels’ dark heart and when it breaks there’s no telling who’ll be washed away.

The Levels

The Razor Gate

You have one year to live. You won’t get sick, you won’t suffer, and nothing you do will stop what’s coming. One year from today, you will die. What you do with that year is up to you.

In Newport City men and women walk the streets, their lives literally ticking away. The ‘Clocks’ are victims of a new serial crime, their existence kept secret by the authorities for fear of spreading panic. The ‘Curse of Willow Heights’ is incurable, its victims seemingly randomly chosen, and the only information the cops have to work with are vague drug memories of passing through something they refer to as ‘the Razor Gate’.

When a Clock blows himself up on a crowded city street, journalist Maya Cassinelli and beat cop Charlie Garrett, whose Clock girlfriend has only days to live, are thrown into the hunt for a cure and something that should be impossible: a man whose own time should’ve been up months before…

The Razor Gate

Murder Park

A five-year-old boy has been snatched from a US housing project and taken halfway round the world to the crumbling ruins of a poisoned city. But he’s no ordinary kid; he’s the rumored heir to a gangland empire like no other on Earth. And the race is on to take him back.

A nineteen-year-old killer needing a ticket home, a professional thief hiding from the father of the woman he loved, and a teenage gang member from one of Manila’s worst slums: from the typhoon-blasted toxic ruin they call ‘the Concrete Sea’ to the abandoned street-gang dueling ground of ‘Murder Park’, to find him they may have to pay a heavy price. And if they can beat the bad guys to the child, will they turn him over to free themselves, or will they do the honorable thing – and risk it all against an individual whose influence courses through every dark street of near-future Manila?

Murder Park

All You Leave Behind

Chase is dead. The package he carried blew up to take out the guy he handed it to. Just a courier, a delivery mechanism for a hit. Collateral damage. That’s how it should’ve gone.

Chase is alive. A stranger got into the package and removed the bomb. She left him a loaded gun and a phone and called him up before he could deliver it to tell him what she’d saved him from. And to say she was giving him the chance for revenge and the tools to take it, if he wanted.

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Or you can find All You Leave Behind at the links below.

All You Leave Behind

Day Zero

When an alien race known as the Surge arrives on Earth with deadly force, three high school kids in Philadelphia find themselves fighting for survival in a city tearing itself to pieces in panic. Pursued through the heart of the horror shattering their ordinary world by creatures hell-bent on dragging them away to a fate they can only guess at, the teenagers must deal with their shock and grief at losing everyone they held dear even as they struggle to stay one step ahead of both the invaders and the forces of a wealthy corporation which seems to know more about the assault than it should.

If the three sixteen-year-olds are going to learn the truth, about themselves as well as the aliens, find out why the Surge came, and maybe determine whether or not humanity has any hope of holding them off, they’ll have to trek of a thousand miles across country from the ruins of Philadelphia to the Gulf Coast. But that’s all in the future; right now they can’t afford to look that far ahead. First they have to get out of the city. First they have to survive day zero.

Day Zero

Virginia Day Zero

Murph and Rory Caulfield are two regular kids in the small town of Coombs in rural Virginia. When their uncle goes to fetch the local sheriff after finding “something bad” on his farm, the boys go to check it out for themselves. What they find is more than just bad, though – it could kill them and everyone they know.

The race is on now. First to escape, then to find out what’s happened to their family and their town. If they can do that, they can think about finding a safe place to hole up away from the horrors that pursue them. But day zero is here, and maybe there are no safe places. Not any more.

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Virginia Day Zero

Hardboiled Jesus

Someone is killing mobsters in brutal and hideous ways, and it’s up to the city’s best cop to find the killer, even if his extreme methods put him at odds with his superiors. That cop is Jesus Christ. Yes, that Jesus Christ. No longer a simple carpenter’s son, he’s come back as a pulp hardboiled detective with a quick mouth and quicker fists!

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Hardboiled Jesus

Wishes

In Wish, a member of the Gardai invents a figure he calls ‘Iron Kurt’ to terrorise the low-grade whackos he has to deal with into behaving themselves. It’s more successful than he could ever have hoped, until events take a turn for the strange and the horrible.

In $20 Future, a boy’s errand across a militia-run town sees him lose the money entrusted to him by his father and drives him to try stealing it back with his friends. But he’s no thief or fighter, and his decision will have terrible consequences for his family.

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Wishes