![]() A few months back, while listening to the audiobook of The Lodger, my Dad called me. Dad never minces words and I can always rely on him for an honest assessment of what works and doesn’t in any of my books. But his assessment of The Lodger was a bit different. I was surprised to hear that the stuff that he found really compelling was the grounded toxic relationship drama side of the story following miserable married couple Ryan and Sophie on their failing farm. The action driven chapters reuniting my recurring antiheroes Maggie and Jack Carlin on a hunt for my recurring villain The Driver, wasn’t really landing for him. Curious, I asked why and his answer stuck with me. ‘Do you think Maggie might be holding you back?’ To get out ahead of any potentially outraged responses here, no I didn’t and no I don’t. But I make it a rule to at least consider any piece of criticism I receive even if I ultimately don’t agree with it. Dad’s feeling was that the Ryan/Sophie material in The Lodger represented a step forward for my writing that considered self-deception and mutual resentment in mature and nuanced ways that felt a little undermined by the schlockier, bloodthirsty elements that came with Maggie’s role in the book. Which begged a different question – had I started finding excuses to include Maggie in stories that didn’t really need her? And if so, why? *** I’ve written before, at length, about how Maggie came to life. How, when writing a short story for a horror anthology in 2017, I introduced her perspective and immediately just knew this character was something else. When two years later I signed a major book deal off the back of an expanded novel version of that same story, my belief was set in stone. This character was special. This character, I would hold on to. Audiences seemed to agree. Early on I allowed myself to believe that Maggie could be my Jack Reacher or James Bond, a character I would come back to again and again, dropping her into all sorts of different misadventures. Even as I wrote The Inheritance, I was already outlining future stories for her. The success of The Hunted made me confident I’d get to tell them. But then, strangled by Covid and a depressed market, The Inheritance underperformed. And not just commercially. There was a sense that whatever undeniable quality The Hunted had was not shared by its follow up. I think part of that is due to its troubled gestation, but ultimately I don’t think The Inheritance has the same visceral drive and punch as its predecessor. It’s a story with far too many moving parts that don’t always cohere in a satisfying way. What I have always been proud of in that book though, is how it develops Maggie. The Inheritance shines a light on all the contradictions that make her so fascinating. Maggie is an instinctively violent, ruthless person who knows all too well that her violence comes from the father she killed for the same reason. She wants to change but has no clue how or who she would be if she did. She craves family and connection but is perpetually denied it by her own nomadic, unstable lifestyle. She protects the vulnerable but never quite knows if she’s doing it because she actually cares or because she wants an excuse to unleash her killer instincts. The fundamental question of Maggie, then, is how she resolves all of these things. The problem with a fundamental question like that, is that at some point you have to answer it. The disappointing reception of The Inheritance put in doubt just how likely answering those questions would be. The feeling at the time was that my smartest next move would be to write a standalone book that didn’t rely on previous ones. So I wrote The Caretaker for HarperCollins. Meanwhile, suspecting that there would be readers out there who still wanted more Maggie, I gave her a prominent (but not leading) role in The Hitchhiker, my next Audible Original. The gambit worked. The Caretaker was a bestseller and The Hitchhiker spent a month at number one on Audible’s Australian charts. It went on to get a print release and a sequel (the aforementioned Lodger) also featuring Maggie. Off the back of The Caretaker I made plans with HarperCollins for another standalone book, High Rise, and decided early on to involve Maggie in that one too. So while she might not have gotten that third book I’d always planned for, fans who wanted more of her certainly were not going hungry. And let’s be real here – chief among those fans is myself. I love Maggie. How could I not? She’s one of those rare characters who writes themselves, who you know inside and out, who feels as real to you as your best friends. If I have the chance to put her in as many stories as possible, why would I ever stop? *** It’s no secret that a lot of the hype that surrounded The Hunted’s release in 2020 was to do with the film version being in development at the same time as the book. I was as susceptible to that hype as anyone else and even started making tweaks to my plans for the books to dovetail more neatly with the film. But Covid stalled the movie early and, in that first iteration, it never unstalled. There were occasional signs of life but soon enough I accepted that the film would never happen and decided not to compromise what I wrote in my books for the sake of movies that would never happen. Even when The Hunted changed hands and was acquired by John Michael McDonagh, one of my favourite writer/directors, the 2023 Writer’s Strike quickly tempered my optimism and so I continued my resolve to not think about film adaptations of my books anymore. Except then the film actually started to move. And with that came interest in my other works from other companies. And suddenly, Maggie turning up in so many stories became a problem. For example – last year we sold a film option on The Hitchhiker, but a major issue was the fact that Maggie could not appear in it due to her character rights being tied up with The Hunted movie. The same issue has arisen with other adaptations. I had ended up in a situation where my books were losing appeal to potential buyers because the character rights were a mess. Some gentle urging was coming my way to stop using Maggie so much, to instead foreground new standalone stories that could be sold outright without having to carve out certain characters. I couldn’t argue that it was sound advice. The crossovers were impacting the chances of one of my books being made into a movie, and that was partly due to my own stubbornness. But, I reasoned, readers still loved Maggie. I was being asked about her at most events I did. I was getting messages from those thrilled at her surprise reappearances. The problem was that I knew an outright third Maggie novel would be a tricky sell after The Inheritance, but that my regular readers wanted it. For a while, my poorly thought-out strategy had been to tread water with cameos and supporting roles until The Hunted movie happened and then hopefully use renewed interest in the books to pick up Maggie’s story where I left off. It would be wrong to resolve her big longstanding questions in novels that were not her own; my intention, then, had always been to return fully to Maggie down the road. But the situation had gotten trickier. I was working overtime to lay the groundwork for a proper return that I could not be sure would happen. And in the process, I was risking stunting those other books’ potential to break out the way The Hunted once had. And while I believed I had audience goodwill on my side, just how many times could Maggie turn up halfway through a different character’s story before it became boring and annoying? A new sense was growing – that I was doing neither the character nor my own career any favours with this scattershot strategy. I had claimed from the start that while my books might take place in a shared universe, they would not rely on each other to make sense, nor build up to some grand Avengers-esque showdown. Each book was intended as a complete work in-and-of-itself, not a smaller puzzle piece that needs five others to make sense. At some point, I had lost sight of that. The Lodger was the biggest victim – what was sold as a direct sequel to The Hitchhiker had also become a sequel to The Inheritance and The Caretaker while setting up High Rise. I needed to rethink some things. This wasn’t to say that I would throw the whole idea of the Maggieverse out the window, but that I might tone down the constant crossovers, make the stories a little more standalone, and make Maggie herself a little less central. But this still left her story up in the air with no sign of a landing. *** As far back as writing The Inheritance, I had considered wrapping Maggie’s story up in a trilogy. I’ve always liked trilogies as a shape for a multiple book series – there’s something clean and definitive about three books representing a beginning, middle and end. It implies that each book is important to the overall story and that nothing is extraneous. I’d already written one trilogy with Boone Shepard, and wondered if I’d be better served crafting one final bow for Maggie that resolved everything in explosive and satisfying fashion, than I would be continuing for an undefined number of books. To finish Maggie’s story I would have to answer those questions about whether she can overcome her violent nature, reveal the truth about her mother’s whereabouts, touch on Detective Olivia Dean’s obsessive pursuit of her (strongly set up in The Inheritance as an ongoing concern) and resolve one last major twist that I had threaded into The Hunted and had always known would be instrumental to Maggie’s end. It felt like a lot to jam into one book, at least a book that would feel at all cohesive or not reliant on previous instalments to make sense. So I sort of left the trilogy idea and continued with my semi-improvised model of putting Maggie in various other stories without really progressing or concluding her own. And then, a few months back, an idea struck me. An idea for exactly the inciting incident that could be a riveting standalone story and also fulfil all of the above obligations, but in a way that would feel not obligatory but natural and inevitable. A full-fledged Maggie novel but a different sort – a borderline reboot closer to Unforgiven than the Wolf Creek or John Wick infused earlier novels. The story of an older, worn down, regret filled Maggie coming out of hiding for one last stand. I felt the story, so strongly. I knew what it would be about. I knew how it would end. And I knew with furious certainty that if I pulled this off, it would not feel like some sort of truncated ending to Maggie but rather a complete and satisfying farewell that built on all the earlier books to craft something totally new and totally distinct and totally right. Something that would seize new readers by the throat while giving old readers some closure. The timing felt particularly fortuitous, with The Hunted’s film adaptation slated to go before cameras in a matter of months. There was, then, an opportunity to time Maggie’s literary goodbye to release alongside her cinematic hello. The more I thought about it, the more fated it felt. There were a couple of elements that sat a little oddly for me. I mentioned above that Maggie appears in High Rise, and the way that book ends means that she would appear in at least a first sequel. Ideally I’ll write a couple. Assuming those go ahead, would it then be a bit odd to give Maggie a big emotional farewell in 2026 only for a younger version of her to turn up a year later in High Rise 2? Probably. But here’s the thing – publishing, like everything, is unstable right now. With the cost of living crisis and all that’s going on in the world, the certainty and stability of a yearly book isn’t something anyone can rely on unless they’re at like a Stephen King level. And if there is one thing I have learned from the last decade of my working life, it’s that nothing I creatively plan for ever quite plays out. In 2019 I figured my next five years would be alternating Maggie and Nelson books. But then The True Colour of a Little White Lie flopped. The Inheritance struggled. The Hitchhiker blew up. The Caretaker hit. As did Andromache Between Worlds, which had never been intended as a series until suddenly there was demand for one. In each case, my plans changed. What I write next has always been directly shaped by the reception of what I wrote before. In a perfect world sure – I’d write a couple of High Rise sequels and then dovetail nicely into a big finale for Maggie. But I know better than to plan so specifically so far ahead. I don’t know what’s coming around the corner. I don’t know if The Hunted movie will be a mega hit that means I suddenly am writing twenty more Maggie books. I don’t know if High Rise will get made into a movie and have me doing Jack Carlin books for a while. I don’t know if Backstory on Audible will blow up or if one of my several film projects will catch fire or if everything will bomb and I’ll wind up in the gutter. Like every creator on the planet right now, my stories are at the mercy of too many factors to count. As such, I have to decide which ones I want to prioritise when I'm given the opportunity to tell them. What I see with the utmost clarity is this; I owe Maggie my career. It’s because of her that I get to live a life I love. It’s because of her I get to travel regularly and live in my favourite suburb and have two dogs and mingle with the kinds of people teenage me could only have dreamed of. It’s because of her that I get to be a full-time writer. I have rewarded her by putting her through hell. She has been shot and stabbed and savaged and disfigured, thrown down stairs and bludgeoned and burned and has still always got back up to rejoin the fight. She is the best character I have ever created and I love her and because of that I have selfishly kept her from the answers she set out looking for. She deserves peace. She deserves resolution. It’s time I gave it to her. *** In 2018, the final Boone Shepard novel came out. It was less a victory lap and more a limp to the finish line. Whatever excitement I’d once felt for those books had waned and I wanted to move on. But right before the release of the final novel I was struck by an impulse. I went down to the pub and without planning or forethought I wrote a short Boone story. A piece that was less a new adventure and more a summation of everything he had meant to me. A last chance to write as this friend who had been with me for a decade of my life. The moment I wrote out the final line I realised that this would be the last time. Suddenly he was gone. For weeks, I felt depleted and empty. You might wonder why I couldn’t just write as him again, but whenever I looked to the place in my mind where Boone used to live, nothing was there. His voice had vanished. His story was done. I’m scared to experience the same thing with Maggie. But I think it’s time. Now, I want to enjoy every moment of this last book. I don’t want to get bored of her, or resent having to write her because I’m looking at moving on. I don’t want to make the same mistakes. Of course I did end up seeing Boone again – as a supporting character in the Andromache books. And it was special and familiar and put a smile on my face, but those books were not his story. I imagine the same thing will happen with Maggie. I might be wrong even about that, but what I know for now is that in a time of deep instability and uncertainty for my industry I’m getting the chance to end Maggie’s story on my terms and I can’t be anything but grateful for that. So, to answer my Dad’s question – no, Maggie is not holding me back. But I think, maybe, I’ve been holding her back. The Reckoning hits shelves in November 2026. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. One more time.
2 Comments
6/21/2025 02:44:13 am
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Jed Herne
7/1/2025 09:37:53 pm
Great article, Gabe! Always so fascinating to see your own creative journey alongside the journey of your characters.
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