Waking up to discover you've been declared dead...

John Grebble wakes up to discover he’s been declared dead. His bank account is frozen, his car repossessed, and his entire existence erased.

Someone wants him to disappear – permanently.

That’s the starting point for John Grebble is Gone, a brand-new short story from West Sussex-based Peter James, creator of the multi-million selling Roy Grace series of novels and their hugely successful TV transfer as Grace.

Within hours, John Grebble’s world unravels. His debit card is declined. His car is towed away. His office locks him out. The police treat him like a criminal. According to every system, every database, every official record, John Grebble is no more.

But John is very much alive. And as he tries to uncover who could have pulled off such an elaborate erasure of his identity, he realises this isn’t just a mistake. It’s personal.

Someone with intimate knowledge of his life has gone to extraordinary lengths to scrub him out completely. And this is just the start…

John Grebble is Gone is published on August 1 on Amazon Kindle and as an audiobook.

“They wanted me to write a thriller and I could not write a Roy Grace because I'm under contract to Pan Macmillan,” Peter says.

“But for some time I had had this idea about writing a story about how we have become more and more and completely dependent on our electronic and digital records now. Even passports are becoming digitised and also driving licences. I barely use my credit card anymore because I've got my credit card on Apple Pay.

“And the thing is that when you've got all your records on paper, it would be extremely hard to wipe someone's records out completely, but if they are digital then you start to wonder just how easily it could be done.”

Peter soon found the right person for it to happen to. Peter admits he likes the notion of “someone who aims low in life and misses!”

“I like the idea of a person that wants to live life below the radar, who just wants to keep everything simple in life. To me there has always been an element of you either live or you don't but I thought it would be rather nice to have this rather meek guy that has never really been anywhere or done anything and who doesn't really have any friends and yet he becomes the target.”

The point is how he reacts: “Nobody has to be the person they are all their life. Anybody you meet, wherever you meet them, everyone has got their own story to tell if you can only mine that story out of them. And I just like the idea of this guy who leads this impossibly dull life in which nothing ever really works out for him. He tries to go on a singles holiday and that's a disaster and so he just accepts his lot until one day someone starts to meddle with him. And it gives him a strength he does not know he had.”

Peter enjoyed taking a break from Roy Grace: “Writing a short story gives me a chance to explore themes that would not work in a Roy Grace novel. I would have to involve Roy and he would have to become the main character. But in this I wanted John Grebble to be the main character and to show that when something like this happens then someone like him doesn’t have to remain the underdog.”

And who knows, we might just see John Grebble again: “The hardest thing about writing is creating convincing characters. And you do have to kill some of them off, certainly in Roy Grace. If you didn't kill some people off, then your readers would not believe that these characters are in danger.

“There's definitely an alchemy about a character and how people connect with them. There is no formula, say, to Hannibal Lecter and why he is such a great villain that people really find themselves rooting for him. Or why people love Roy Grace so much. It's like an invisible formula…”

And that makes it tempting to return to someone who clearly comes alive.

“I do think perhaps we might see John Grebble again sometime!”