What happens if you disturb a nest of hornets? Well, you might get stung. Repeatedly.

Not so very long ago I wrote here about Alastair MacNeill: The entire author profile smells fishy, the submitted manuscript that started his career was never published and I’m wondering why Alastair MacNeill hasn’t written a novel since 2000 when one reads that he came to Britain to ‘pursue a career in writing’.

His agent at Christopher Little claims (personal communication, June 7, 2013) that ‘Alastair MacNeill has not permanently retired from writing, but he does not have any work that is due to be published in the near future either’ and – rather cryptically – that ‘He has not written anything under a pseudonym’. Which is technically true if Alastair MacNeill is itself a pseudonym.

Curiously, shortly after I had contact with his agents, MacNeill’s profile on their website changed. It now claims that Alastair MacNeill ‘has now moved back to live in South Africa’.

And now, out of the blue, a new novel (could one say ‘a novel novel’?) has been published under the name Alastair MacNeill. ‘Facades‘ has been released in June, 2015 and tells us that it is written by the ‘Author of Double Blind’.

But the most interesting feature is that ‘Facades’ has only been issued as an e-book. Which is rather odd, because Alastair MacNeill supposedly wrote a number of books that met with reasonable commercial success.

So, according to his agents, Alastair MacNeill has returned to South-Africa and – two years ago – had not any work that was due to be published in the near future. Then ‘Facades‘ became available via Amazon.co.uk. No publicity has been generated by his agents and what does a writer these days do to create his own publicity? He turns to social media and posts glowing reviews and news on Twitter and Facebook. Not Alastair MacNeill. He is curiously absent from social media.

Which begs the question again: is the pseudonym Alastair MacNeill again used by another unknown writer from the client list Christopher Little?