Breaking cover

What can I say, but taa-dah!  Here is the wonderful cover for “Faith, Hope and Trickery”:

You will recognise the usual three elements: engraving of a figure, blurry background document, and bespoke font-ed title.  I can’t begin to tell you the trouble we had finding our figure this time – all the standard preachers were too old or too 1790s or too wiggy or too static, and often all four.  But eventually we found this rather Byronic chap, emoting in a graveyard, and the marvellous people at Design for Writers very kindly gave him some preaching bands – the white things at his collar – borrowed from another image.

As for the colour, the choice was unanimous.  I don’t think I mentioned this – should have done – but on Valentine’s Day I was guest speaker at a crime book club which meets at bookshop Heffers in Cambridge, called Crimecrackers.  I had a whale of a time, as I always do when asked to speak about Sam, and when I told them about the plot of “FH&T”, they all chorused that the cover should be purple – ecclesiastical purple.  And so it came to pass.