My adult books may have taken centre stage in my social media posts lately, not least because I have been mired in line edits and they have been occupying my thoughts, but it’s time to turn out attention back to YA. The third book in my YA assassin trilogy, The Butterfly Assassin, is coming out in May, and today I get to share with you the cover! (And, officially, the title, although you already knew that part.)

So, without further ado, here it is:

Isn’t it great? I love how strongly it leans into the street art theme: I feel like this genuinely looks like something you could see sprayed on a wall. My group chat are also pleased with how bisexual the colour scheme is. Not that it’s a particularly bi book, although I would say that the casual background queerness of Isabel’s world becomes more apparent in this one and her own efforts to understand (or to lose) herself further illuminate it. It’s a good colour scheme, in any case.

We’ve also broken free of the by day / by night tagline schema that we used for the first two books… a controversial choice, I know, but it’s a very different kind of book, one in which Isabel’s no longer able to maintain the separation of a double life but forced to grapple with everything that’s happened to her, away from the masks and the self-deception that let her ignore it. So we needed a new approach.

Still, I think the three books look pretty cool together:

As for the book itself…

It’s difficult to talk too much about Moth to a Flame without significant spoilers for The Hummingbird Killer, and I know that I have quite a few new blog readers and social media followers who might not have had a chance to pick up the first two books yet. But if The Hummingbird Killer was where I broke everything, Moth to a Flame is where I fix it — or at least, start to put the broken pieces back together.

This book has quite a different tone to the first two. Where The Butterfly Assassin sits comfortably in the YA space with its themes of seeking independence, developing identity outside of your parents’ expectations, balancing school with the rest of your life, and the like, The Hummingbird Killer took us a little further into the crossover zone as Isabel started to live a young adult life, dealing with a day job and a flatmate. Moth to a Flame continues that trajectory, since Isabel is firmly a young adult by this point. At the same time, younger characters (like Sam) allow Isabel a chance to reconnect with a childhood/adolescence she never really got to have, stopping us from slipping all the way into the territory of adult fiction. Still definitely upper YA; I think the official recommendation is 14+, but maybe we might be appealing more to the older readers here.

The mood is a little more introspective and character-focused, compared to the more action-heavy earlier installments, and there’s also considerably less murder. To put that into context: when I tried to keep track of the body count of The Hummingbird Killer, I lost track around 50; by contrast, I think there are 3 murders in Moth to a Flame (or at least, three that have on-page significance/directly impact on our characters, though there are some referenced, off-page deaths). So you can see that’s a bit of a shift.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about this — that the book’s focus on healing, recovery, justice, and breaking cycles of violence would be a disappointment to those looking for a stabby, action-filled thriller. But it was important to me to write it like this, in opposition to my original plans for the book back in 2014-15 (which were just so very depressing). This story is substantially about grappling with harm that can’t be undone and damage that can’t be fixed, and when I say that this is a more hopeful story of healing, I don’t mean to suggest that everything’s going to be all right for everyone. But my original plans for the book were bleak, and I realised I wasn’t interested in telling that story, and that I had to do something different with this one than I’d done with the first two.

I joked on Tumblr that this is the Bucky Barnes Recovery Fic of the series. I have a soft spot for these stories — stories that step outside of the action and breathless plot of canon to focus on the slow process of a traumatised ex-assassin learning how to be a person again, grappling with grief and guilt, trying to make sense of their culpability for the acts they were forced by others to commit. Bucky and Isabel have quite different backstories, and I wouldn’t want to overstate the influence these fics had on me; nevertheless, these are the stories that taught me sometimes the most narratively interesting thing you can do with a character like this is allow them to heal and, through that healing, ask difficult questions about justice and punishment and repairing harm.

And, finally, this is also a book where the underlying themes of the whole series become significantly less subtle. I have always been criticising the military recruitment of teenagers, the arms industry that places profit above lives, and the social and political attitudes that enable these to continue, but this book’s wider geographical scope (no longer limited to the walled city of Espera) means this stops being metaphorical or abstract and starts being overt. Again, this might be an unpopular choice, but there’s no other way I could have written this book that would have felt true to me.

So, basically, this is where it becomes most obvious that this trilogy about assassins was written by a pacifist. Which some people might not like! But, on the other hand, I think in the world we live in right now, there’s a need for stories about grappling with aftermath and recovery — stories where love and found family and cosy scenes with cake don’t exist only in a low-stakes, low-danger environment, but are deliberately built as an act of resistance and a process of recovery. It’s a story about the power of friendship: not the power to prevent violence or harm, necessarily, but to create a life after violence, and rebuild safety from the ground up.

(Once it’s out, I’d love to do a big long thinky post about my epigraph choices for all three books and what they signify for me; the one for Moth to a Flame is very much about friendship in the face of monstrosity and violence.)

Anyway. Those are the vibes of the book. But, truthfully, I am mainly relying on the cliffhanger ending of The Hummingbird Killer to serve as the main pre-order incentive for this one, because if you read that and don’t want to know what happens next, well, I don’t think anything I say is going to change your mind 😅

Just in case, though, here’s a quick graphic showing some of the other things the book contains:

I mean, who could resist that all important trope: “Leeds?”

(Yes, this book is largely set in Leeds. Yes, that’s a spoiler for The Hummingbird Killer. Yes, several of the locations in the book are real. No, none of the people in the book are real. Yes, this is why I went on a research trip to Leeds last year and took a truly disproportionate number of pictures of weird corners of the central library. Now you know!)

I think we’re still tweaking the cover copy and final blurb, but here’s the blurb as it appears on retail sites currently:

Isabel Ryans has fled Espera, leaving behind her identity as teen assassin the Moth. Now she’s trying to adjust to the reality of the outside world. But her grief and trauma are catching up with her, and surrounded by civilians who will never understand what life is like in the walled city, she feels more alone than ever.

When a journalist is murdered nearby, suspicion automatically falls on Isabel. And inside Espera’s walls, the abolitionist movement is gaining strength. When Isabel’s search for the killer leads to an unexpected reunion, she’s forced to decide whether she can really leave the city behind, and what part the Moth might have to play in the uprising.

Is Isabel Ryans the city’s saviour . . . or its scapegoat?

Moth to a Flame will be released on 23rd May, and it’s available to pre-order now.