There’s a particular kind of welcome that comes with returning to a series you’ve already built. The world doesn’t need explaining to you anymore—you know the weight it carries, the rules that govern it, the exceptions that make those rules interesting. You know Mick Hargraves and Diana Reeves. You know what they’ve survived. But returning to them with a new case, a new threat, means asking: what hasn’t been tested yet? What question about this universe have we left unanswered?
For The Displaced, that question emerged gradually, through the gaps in the world I’d already constructed.
A Universe Without Certainty
The Black Eyes and Broken Souls series has, from the beginning, resisted neat theological frameworks. There is no omniscient deity drawing the lines between light and dark, no divine plan unfolding towards predetermined closure. Instead, the world operates on older, stranger mechanics: material realms layered against infernal and celestial ones, life forces that can be consumed or corrupted, and transitions that happen whether or not anyone is ready for them. It’s a universe governed by systems rather than doctrine—which is, in many ways, more frightening than any simple good-and-evil binary could be.
But that framework left gaps. Spaces where I hadn’t yet worked out how the rules applied. And The Displaced began by asking: what hasn’t been fully tested? What remains unexplored within the mechanics I’ve already established?
The Shape of Investigation
Detective work, in any form, is about accumulation. You gather details that don’t make sense until, suddenly, they do. You follow leads that go nowhere. You find the one thread that, when pulled, unravels everything. It’s methodical and frustrating and occasionally revelatory. It’s also the perfect form for investigating the supernatural, because the supernatural doesn’t announce itself with fanfare—it reveals itself in the spaces between normal evidence, in the patterns that shouldn’t be there, in the things that don’t add up.
The Displaced is shaped around that detective work. Multiple angles of approach. Evidence that fragments across different perspectives. The reader, gradually, beginning to see more clearly than the investigators themselves.
The Architecture of Collaboration
Returning to Mick and Reeves meant returning to a partnership that has earned its depth. They have worked together under impossible conditions. Reeves knows Mick houses a four-thousand-year-old demon and has integrated that into her operating procedure the way you do when you’ve decided something is true and need to move forward. Mick defers to Marchosias and to Reeves with equal weight, trusting each to see what he cannot. There’s shorthand between them—the things they don’t need to say because they’ve already learned how to read the silences.
But The Displaced was also the opportunity to expand that architecture. To bring in new angles of vision, new ways of approaching the impossible.
Bringing in Emily Hendricks
Dr. Emily Hendricks has been at the periphery before, but The Displaced brings her into a more central role. She is a specialist—capable, precise, and fundamentally unshaken by the impossible. What I found compelling about deepening her character was her quality of professional acceptance. She doesn’t perform comfort with the supernatural. She doesn’t perform discomfort either. She approaches extraordinary things the way she approaches anything: with methodical interest and the understanding that something unusual is simply factual data that needs examining.
She reads people carefully—a professional habit of observation that serves her well when working with a team that operates at the edges of consensus reality. She has been assembling her own understanding of how this collaboration works, what it costs, what it means. And she has concluded that this is precisely what she wants to be part of.
There’s something about Hendricks that builds intrigue the more space you give her. She is not a character who needs to come to understanding—she arrives capable of assembling it. What drives her perspective is not revelation but examination. She looks at things and determines what they are.
New Ground to Cover
Every case tests the rules differently. In The Displaced, the investigation opens up questions that the previous cases didn’t quite need to answer. It pushes against the edges of what Mick and Jade can perceive, what Reeves can investigate within legal and professional boundaries, what Hendricks can document and understand. It asks: when something doesn’t fit into the categories we have language for, what then?
The novel is shaped to let all these angles of approach develop in parallel, each one legitimate, each one incomplete without the others. Four different perspectives, converging on a case that none of them fully understands alone. That layering, that fragmentation of evidence and understanding, is where the story finds its shape.
Coming Home to the Work
Returning to Mick and Reeves after the completion of earlier cases felt like coming home to an unfinished room. The tools were there. The understanding was there. The question waiting was sharper because so much else had been resolved. And when I began to write The Displaced, I found what I always find with this series: that the characters know what they need to do, and my job is to keep up with them and write it down.
The investigation unfolds through their choices, their capacities, their limitations. There is no clean answer waiting at the end, no simple resolution that will make the world make sense again. There is only the work—the methodical, frustrating, occasionally revelatory work of detective work in a world where the rules don’t follow the shape of comfortable theology.
The series continues. The darkness deepens. The questions get harder.
And that’s exactly where I want to be writing.