Author
Later this week, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday. And I want to share in the festivities by giving YOU a gift!
Now through July 4th, use the code usbday to get $2.50 off a copy of one of my books.
And if you want to get my complete collection of five books, enter the code jul4$ to get $17.76 off your order!
I hope you enjoy the weekend, and if you’re reading a book, let me know what you’re reading!
The group had no reason to die. That is the first and most important thing to understand about the Dyatlov Pass incident, and the reason it has occupied investigators, physicists, mountaineers, and mystery writers for more than sixty years. Igor Dyatlov was twenty-three years old and had led more than a dozen Ural expeditions. His eight companions were experienced ski-hikers — students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute — preparing for the highest difficulty rating in Soviet mountaineering certification. They had the right equipment, the right experience, and the right weather window. On the night of February 1st, 1959, on a slope called Kholat Syakhl — which translates from the indigenous Mansi language as Dead Mountain — something made nine competent people abandon every survival instinct they possessed, and run into the dark to die.
Search teams found the tent three weeks later. It had been slashed open from the inside — not clawed, not burst outward, but carefully cut, as though someone inside needed to exit quickly and the door was not an option. Footprints in the snow led away downhill, toward the tree line, some 1,500 metres distant. The prints showed the group had walked in a relatively orderly file — not a panicked scatter. Whatever they were fleeing, they were still capable of coordinated movement. They were wearing socks, or were barefoot. Not a single pair of boots had been taken from the tent.
The bodies were recovered in stages, each discovery more confusing than the last. The first five were found near the tree line, beneath a large cedar that showed signs of having been climbed — branches broken high up, as though someone had needed to see over the slope. Two of these hikers showed severe frostbite and signs they had tried to make a fire with their bare hands. A third body was found partway back up the slope toward the tent, as though he had turned around and tried to return. He had not made it.
The final four were found two months later, buried under four metres of snow in a ravine, and these were the deaths that transformed a tragedy into a genuine mystery. Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had massive skull fractures. Lyudmila Dubinina and Semyon Zolotarev had fractured ribs on both sides of the chest — the kind of damage consistent with a car crash, or an industrial press. There was no external bruising to explain these injuries. The force, whatever it was, had been applied from within, or from a direction no blunt external object could account for. And Lyudmila Dubinina was missing her tongue, her eyes, and part of her lips. The medical examiner noted that the soft tissue appeared to have decomposed rapidly, but a later examination of the report suggested this explanation did not adequately account for what was found — and what was not.
Several items of clothing tested positive for elevated radiation. One investigator who reviewed the case years later noted that the orange-brown discoloration of the hikers’ skin was consistent with radiation exposure. It is also consistent with severe cold, and the debate continues. The Soviet government classified the file. Russia opened a new formal investigation in 2019, which concluded in 2020 that the most likely explanation was a specific type of avalanche. This explanation was immediately disputed by nearly every researcher who had studied the case. The tent showed no evidence of an avalanche impact. The slope gradient was wrong. And nothing about an avalanche accounts for the missing tongue.
The Dyatlov Pass is now a registered tourist destination. A small museum in Yekaterinburg holds what remains of the group’s equipment and photographs — including a roll of film recovered from the tent, developed after the discovery, showing the last images the hikers took. The final frames are unexposed. Whatever happened on that mountain, the camera was not pointed at it.
When it comes to unsolved mysteries, few capture the imagination quite like the Lost Amber Room. Crafted in the early 18th century, this dazzling chamber made entirely of amber panels, gold leaf, and mirrors disappeared during the chaos of World War II—and has never been found. But what does this enigmatic masterpiece have to do with Victorian England? As a fan of Victorian-era mysteries and steampunk, you’ll love how this story weaves together history, art, and intrigue.
Originally created in Prussia and later installed in Russia’s Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg, the Amber Room was hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Its walls shimmered with thousands of amber panels, crafted into intricate mosaics and framed with gold leaf. The chamber represented the pinnacle of Baroque craftsmanship and was a symbol of immense wealth and power.
Though the Amber Room predates the Victorian era, it became well-known to British aristocrats, collectors, and scholars during the 19th century. Many Victorian-era travelers documented the room in detailed sketches and writings, spreading fascination with its beauty across England.
Victorian England was also a hub for master craftsmen skilled in amber work and woodcarving. The techniques used by these artisans parallel those required to construct and restore the Amber Room, suggesting that Victorian workshops might have held the knowledge to replicate or repair parts of the room.
Despite numerous searches and investigations, the Amber Room’s fate remains unknown. Was it destroyed in the war, hidden away in a secret vault, or smuggled out piece by piece? Its story blends art, war, and lost technology, making it an endless source of inspiration for writers and historians alike.
My calendar is starting to fill up for 2026. On Thursday, May 21 I will be one of five authors taking part in the Author Publishing Panel at Bound Books in York. If you want to get your book published but don’t know where to start, come join us! All five of us have taken different paths to get our work into the world. There will be goodies and freebies, too!
On July 31, I will be one of the authors taking part in Fable Con, also in York.
Last, but not least, you can now find my books at KMD Chaos Reads Indie Bookstore in Warren, OH!
You can get more information on both of these events here.
I look forward to seeing you out and about!
On the first morning of December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach near Adelaide, South Australia. He wore brown trousers, a smart jacket and polished shoes. To those who passed him in the small hours, he looked like a man asleep in the warm southern summer. By morning it was clear he was not asleep. He was dead, with no obvious cause, and no identification whatsoever.
The police investigation that followed became one of the most exhaustively documented and thoroughly baffling cold cases of the twentieth century. Every label had been carefully removed from every item of his clothing. His fingerprints matched no record in Australia, Britain, or the United States. His dental work matched no known patient. Despite a public inquest and international press coverage, not a single person came forward to identify him. He was, impossibly, a man who had never existed in any official record.
Five months after the body was found, detectives discovered a small hidden fob pocket sewn into the waistband of the man’s trousers. Inside was a tiny rolled scrap of paper, torn from the final page of a rare Persian poetry collection called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Two words in Farsi: Tamam Shud: “it is ended,” or “finished.”
Police traced the torn book to a man who had found it thrown onto the back seat of his unlocked car, parked near Somerton Beach, on the night of the death. Inside the book’s back cover, written in pencil and since partially rubbed out, was a phone number and a string of capital letters in five short lines. Cryptographers have never successfully decoded that message. The world’s best codebreakers, including teams from the NSA and GCHQ who examined it in later decades, have offered no consensus explanation.
“In seventy-five years, no one has identified him, explained the code, or determined with certainty whether he was murdered, poisoned himself, or simply stopped living by choice.”
The phone number led to a nurse (later known publicly only as “Jestyn” to protect her identity), who denied knowing the man but was observed by the detective to go pale when shown a plaster cast of his face. She had, it emerged, previously owned a copy of the same rare edition of the Rubaiyat. She gave no further explanation. She is now dead. Her identity was revealed by researchers in 2014, but her secrets died with her.
The city of Adelaide gave him a name for his grave: “The Unknown Man.” He has never been anyone else.
The case has attracted an almost cult following among mystery enthusiasts, and generated dozens of books, documentaries, and theories ranging from the plausible (Cold War intelligence operative who took a cyanide capsule) to the elaborate (an Australian espionage network tied to nuclear secrets at Woomera, just north of Adelaide). None have been proven. None have been disproven. The man on the beach remains, in every meaningful sense, finished and utterly unknowable.
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A dead man with no name, no past, and a cryptic message that was never meant to be found. It sounds like something from a penny dreadful.
Fifty years earlier, in a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland, something almost identical happened. Except the bodies were never even found.
— ✦ —
The Flannan Isles, a cluster of remote, inhospitable rocks twenty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, got a lighthouse in 1899. It was a triumph of Victorian engineering, constructed at enormous expense precisely because the waters around it had been killing ships for centuries. Three keepers operated it on rotation.
On the 26th of December, 1900, the relief vessel Hesperus arrived to rotate the crew. No one came to meet the boat. No flag flew. The landing party found the lighthouse in perfect working order — the light still functioning, the lens turning on its mechanism — and no sign of the three men.
The logbook told a story that has never been explained. The final entries, written by head keeper James Ducat, described the men as acting strangely in the days before the disappearance. Normally stoic men were said to be praying, weeping, and speaking in hushed tones about something outside. The last entry was dated December 15th. The last notation, in a different hand: “Storm ended, sea calm. God is over all.”
What the relief crew found inside was a mystery in miniature, as precisely detailed and as ultimately unexplainable as the Tamam Shud case would be five decades later. The kitchen table was set for a meal that had not been eaten. One chair was overturned. Two sets of oilskins were still hung on their pegs meaning at least one man had gone outside into whatever weather had claimed them without his protective gear. The clocks had all stopped. There was no sign of struggle, no blood, no indication of where or how three experienced lighthouse keepers — men who worked in one of the most dangerous marine environments in Britain — had simply ceased to exist.
“The official report suggested a freak wave. But the lighthouse stood forty feet above the high-water mark. And there was only one set of oilskins missing from three hooks.”— Northern Lighthouse Board inquiry, 1901
The Northern Lighthouse Board’s inquiry concluded, somewhat limply, that a freak wave of unusual size had caught all three men outside simultaneously. This explanation has satisfied almost no one in the century since. Lighthouse keepers of that era were governed by ironclad protocols against leaving the structure unmanned; for all three to be outside at once would have been a near-unthinkable breach. The overturned chair, the uneaten food, the log entries describing something nameless and frightening: none of it fits a simple story about a wave.
The Flannan Isles have never been inhabited since. The lighthouse is now automated. The last entry in the keepers’ log remains, sealed in an archive in Edinburgh, ending mid-thought — a sentence that begins and does not conclude, as though the man writing it simply put down his pen and walked into whatever was waiting outside the door.
That’s the detail that lodges under your skin as a writer. Random accidents are messy. This wasn’t. And when something terrible happens neatly, you are forced to ask: who was keeping the secret, and from whom?