Clair Harlow · Book 1 · November 2026
Silent Halls
The danger isn’t a body in an alley. It’s the slow, precise humiliation of not belonging.
A different city and a different kind of dread. Clair Harlow is a dark-academia psychological thriller set inside the closed, glittering world of an elite institution.
Publishing November 2026 · Koi House Press · Cover design not final
A new series
Why this one, and why now
If Ray Holder is what happens when a city stops watching out for its own, Clair Harlow is what happens when an institution decides who counts as one of its own in the first place.
The books are about class, exclusion and imposter syndrome inside places built to make some people feel they belong and others feel they never will — panelled libraries, old money, quiet dread. The suspense is psychological rather than physical: nobody is chased down an alley, and the worst thing that happens to you in a term might be a sentence said pleasantly in front of the right people.
Silent Halls was the first book Joe Gaston ever wanted to write, and the last one he felt ready for. It publishes in November 2026.
Same author, different world.
Readers of the Ray Holder books should know this is a genuine change of register — a psychological thriller rather than a police-adjacent crime novel. If Birmingham noir is what you came for, the Ray Holder series is still where to go.
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A short letter when there's something worth saying: a new Ray Holder case, a bonus scene, or the first word on Silent Halls. Nothing else.