Midnight's Shadow
When I began writing The Midnight Series, I had a plan.
That in itself was unusual.
I rarely outline my stories in great detail. I normally begin with the characters, a situation and a vague idea of where everyone is heading, then follow them and see what trouble they manage to get themselves into.
Jessie Fordham was different.
From the beginning, I knew there was much more to Jessie than the woman who would eventually become caught up in the dangerous world of wartime espionage. I wanted to understand what shaped her, what drove her and, perhaps most importantly, what made her capable of becoming the woman we meet later in The Midnight Series.
In the first novel, Walking Away from Midnight, we first encounter Jessie as a child growing up within a fractured military family. Later in the book, we meet her again as a young woman graduating from Cambridge in the summer of 1939, with Europe moving inexorably towards war.
But there was a gap.
Something had happened between those two versions of Jessie Fordham.
The child and the young woman were connected, but I increasingly felt there was a missing piece to her story. Somewhere along the way, Jessie had begun to change. The qualities that would later make her valuable in a world of secrets, deception and danger had already started to emerge.
Midnight's Shadow grew from my desire to discover that missing piece.
Set shortly before Jessie leaves Cambridge, the novella takes us back to a younger Jessie, before the war changes everything. She has no idea what lies ahead of her, but we begin to see the first hints of the woman she will become and the path that will eventually lead her into wartime espionage.
For readers who already know Jessie, Midnight's Shadow offers a chance to go back and see where part of her journey began.
For readers meeting her for the first time, it is an introduction to Jessie Fordham and the world of The Midnight Series.
Either way, I hope this glimpse into her past adds another piece to the puzzle of a character whose story became far larger than I ever imagined when I first sat down to write it.
Midnight's Shadow is a prequel novella to The Midnight Series.
Copyright © Tom Kane 2026
To download your FREE eBook of Midnight's Shadow, click here - https://getbook.at/MidnightsShadowBF
When you have read your eBook and wish to make a comment or write a review, use the comments section below. I love to hear what my readers think of my work, good or bad.