Big News! My First Fiction Debuts in Fall 2027

So, I’ve been waiting for this announcement for months and… here’s the official notice from Publisher’s Marketplace:

If you follow me on Facebook or follow some of my socials, you’ll know I’ve been hinting about this for months. People were likely wondering, “What’s with all the gin, Kat?” or “Why did you spend three weeks in London in April?”

Well, now you know.

My London trip was to “fact check” the book. Yes, I know it’s fiction, but the facts must be right. You know that old saying, “You can take the girl out of journalism, but you can never take the journalism out of the girl.”

I’ve always written non-fiction. I started as a reporter, spent a decade in the online content trenches with Microsoft, and then shifted gears to write non-fiction books, mainly culinary memoirs.

But I’ve always yearned to write novels. I’ve had the idea for this book in my head since around 2002, when I was living in the Covent Garden neighborhood of London.

For years, people, all good and generous souls, warned me against shifting from non-fiction to fiction. “Waste of time,” more than one person told me. “Too difficult,” others said.

I’ve made feeble attempts to write it on and off over the past decade but it wasn’t until after my mother died and my Florida house was devastated by a hurricane that I finally thought, “Well, I have nothing else to lose.”

I finished a solid draft last autumn, and after several significant drafts and rewrites, I sold it in March. The tentative publication date is Fall 2027.

This doesn’t mean I won’t write another memoir. But I have two novels to write first, a podcast and many other projects afoot, including a TV show based on my first book in development. Not greenlit. But it’s out there. And the beautiful, winsome Rachel Bilson is signed up to play me. Crazy, huh?

Sign up as a free or paid members to get regular updates ont he book, advance notice of events and all kinds of other good stuff.

Oh, and a quick reminder: founding members will get a signed first edition hardcover of The Active Gin Society when it launches next fall with a personal note from me.

This will likely change over time, but for now, here’s the 200-word Amazon-style description to describe the upcoming book:

Joining London’s most exclusive club is impossible.
Uncovering it may cost one woman everything.

When food writer Marnie Wells returns to London to settle her late father’s affairs, she expects grief, paperwork, and a flat full of botany books. Instead, she unearths a mysterious tin of juniper berries, a trail of coded research, and mounting evidence that her father’s fatal fall from a vintage double-decker bus was no accident.

Her search leads her beneath the cobbled streets of Covent Garden to the Active Gin Society, a centuries-old brotherhood of corrupt politicians, shady financiers, and plotting power brokers bound by a shared secret they will do anything to protect.

As Marnie navigates a shadowy world built on illusion, an unexpected romance blooms with Jameson, a charming tour guide historian whose own family history is tangled in the Society’s past. Together with a glamorous best friend and a French wine bar owner who knows more than he pours, they uncover a conspiracy stretching from the Gin Craze of the 1700s to the top tiers of modern British power.

A witty, deliciously immersive thriller steeped in real history, The Active Gin Society explores how far we might go to uncover the truth, what we would sacrifice to cheat death, and whether some miracles are better left buried.