With UnderInk Press slated to release the fourth Maynard Trigg novel late in 2026, we sat down with the author D.C. McNeill to reflect on the series so far, and look ahead to the fourth installment and reveal the title and cover art.
Q: It’s been a while, so I have to ask, what kind of year was 2025 for your writing?
Honestly? A brilliant one. I acquired a [redacted] new tablet early in the year which basically tripled my output, and I’ve been reading a lot more than ever. So from a creative perspective, an incredibly rewarding year even if personal circumstances have not been fantastic.
Q: I heard you mention the reading spike on the ZeroIndent Review podcast, you read what, thirty, forty books last year?
Something like that, yeah. On paper, I wrote three full novels in the year, but unedited, of course, so that doesn’t count as we all know.
Q: Let’s talk about book three very quickly, and where we leave our protagonist, Maynard Trigg and his friends.
Well, this will be tough without spoiling the ending of book three, but I’ll try to summarise where we are. So Maynard Trigg is the child of a Councillor on the skyport of Carthage. He lives in a world separated from the ground by Dust, a corrosive storm of red particles. He is pulled from his life by a pirate, called Moony, who tells him that a creature is after him. The creature is real, a sort of cloaked eldritch creature that pursues Maynard without reprieve because of a discovery his father made: a Pre-Dust vault, locked, only accessible via some formula left in his father’s coat.
Maynard navigates mystery and danger across the skies to keep this formula safe with the help of Abbey Blackthorn, a violent ex-revolutionary with a checkered past. She becomes a sort of older sister and mentor for Maynard, but her relationship with honesty is thin at best, but they learn to look out for each other.
Ultimately they find a home at The Crucible, a school of alchemy and mathematics and all sorts of things. This he uses to try and uncover the meaning of the formula, with limited results.
In book three Maynard has established a complex life: by day is he a star pupil of rhetoric and machinations. By night he runs with a gang of petty thieves managed by his friend Hogwood. And somewhere in the middle, he and his friend Erika maintain a budding potential romance. This life all comes down when a mysterious ally of the pirate revolution, Jocea Baylock, ropes Maynard into a heist that goes wrong. The Seeker reappears, and Maynard must flee his new home in search of answers. His investigation continues at Harfwere, an ancient waystation. This, predictably, reveals that… I can talk around this without spoilers I think. Basically the princess is in another castle, and they set their sights on the heart of the empirical civilisation, The Veil. The Veil is, to our knowledge, the only piece of actual ground still accessible, atop a gigantic mountain range, and the seat of Parliament’s power over the skies.
A great truth comes out about Abbey’s past, and Maynard finds himself ready to go it alone.
How was that? Didn’t even spoil half of the book.
Q: Nicely done. Okay, so, here’s a character who built a life that’s come apart, what’s next for him?
Well, I’d always intended the series to be six novels. That was the original deal, but as I completed the re-write of book four, things clarified: not six but four novels. Sort of. Books four and five will be twin novels. Separate titles but deeply related and meant to be read as one urtext to conclude the series, reflective and obscurative to each other.
Q; Was there a particular inspiration for that form, or did it just emerge?
That’s like asking an author how they get their ideas: a bit of both. Though most recently inspired by Emily St John Mandel’s anti-trilogy of novels starting with Station Eleven and ending with Sea of Tranquility. What I admired, and sought to rearrange, is how she used the concept of a sequel to intervene in the idea of a novel itself. I didn’t take it quite that far, books four and five follow directly on from one another, but the spirit of that, that one could be a particular genre, and the next could be something else entirely, has always been the lifeblood of the Maynard series.
Q: That’s how we speak about them internally, right? That this character is kind of moving through a different genre each outing.
Right, yeah. Book one is a classical coming of age thriller. Book two is a murder mystery. Book three is a horror slasher. Which, in that case, I’d describe book four as a western, and book five as something like a war or revolution story. Not that I ascribe to content genres too heavily, but that was always the project, as you said, to move through a different genre each novel.
Q: Could you elaborate on the genre of book four then? What should we be excited for in this next installment?
Oh man, it’s definitely the darkest novel, at least politically, in the series. Maynard and Abbey are not together for the first time: they’ve gone their separate ways because of what we learn at the end of book three. So Maynard finds himself allied to a relative stranger, Victoria Silway, on the dusty slopes of Dead Man’s Wharf.
The Wharf is the colonial farming engine that feeds The Veil. They live in the shadow of this city of glass, being paid terribly for their hard work, with the looming threat of the white law the entire time. When we join the story, Maynard and Victoria have been there for some time, trying to find a way to penetrate the city with designs of finding where the President has stored all of the discoveries Maynard’s father was after.
To make matters more complex, Maynard is concealing his identity once again, and finds himself inexplicably working with a familiar face that puts him in danger.
Q: When you say it’s a western, what does that mean, exactly?
There’s a corrupt law man, enacting violence, and a protagonist who must cross a number of lines to stop them. The real question becomes how far will Maynard go to do what he thinks is right, and who might get hurt in the process. I’d also say it’s the first explicitly political entry in the series. Being literally beneath The Veil it’s the first time Maynard has to deal with some realities he’s been shielded against for most of his life. He knows the white law are bad, right, but he’s on their doorstep and begins to confront the levers of power and mechanisms that they use to get away with their project of empire.
Most exciting for me is the opportunity to open the aperture and paint in some of the question marks readers have had about the world.
Also, this book is a prison break, sort of, which was such a treat to construct.
Q: Is there a character or theme that expands, what did you call it, the aperture, the best for you?
Lloyd is my favourite addition. He’s this typical cowboy, he wears the hat and all. He’s the first character we’ve met who Maynard finds himself unable to read or predict. Maynard is this, you know, he’s forced himself to develop this toolset in response to his life being under threat so often, and when that toolset begins to fail him, Lloyd knows all the right buttons to push. The how and the why Lloyd is like this is some of my favourite character writing since the early pages of book three when we meet Captain Latimer’s pirate crew.
I also feel a renewed responsibility to the series when it comes to characters like this. While it’s been a few years since book three, I’ve spent that time honing the world, and working on stories within the universe to make characters like Lloyd possible. Not to say he’s an extant character and he’ll have a prequel novel or anything. I suppose what I mean is that in defining the contours of the world more keenly, character qualities are more readily available from the web of context that is available to me. It’s the difference between driving home in your neighbourhood, seeing a delay, and instinctively knowing three alternate routes, versus relying on your maps to reroute you. They both get you there, but the immediacy is such a reward for all the extra work.
Q: I’ve only a few more prepared questions, then I’ll ask you for the big reveal. I asked this last time and we weren’t quite ready to say, but are you prepared to speak about some of these side projects?
Hah! Thought I’d slipped that past you in our email chain. Absolutely, yes. I’ve a full novel that is very much for younger audiences. My friend’s kid is maybe ten, and the core series is a little too mature for that age, so this was really for that age demographic. But if you’re a Maynard Trigg fan there’s a tremendous amount of world building in there, and a brief cameo I won’t spoil.
On the opposite end I’ve written an adult political drama that fleshes out the white law, its functions, its empire, and of all things, scotch. That one snuck up on me as well. That started with a fabulous new iron skillet I was gifted and a fabulous bottle of Gragganmore. Go figure.
Q: And the last?
How do you know… someone in my life is getting a talking to after this.
Q: You left it on the shared [redacted] document.
Oh, well (David pauses here to obviously delete a row in our shared spreadsheet, grinning). I don’t want to say too much about this novel other than it is likely to be the start of a trilogy, and concerns itself with an event we hear described in book one: a long winter on Carthage, when the blizzards are so bad no one can leave.
Q: I won’t press any further, instead, let’s change gears. You shared the preview chapters with me in November, and the title seems very fitting indeed.
Great segue, we ought to have you host the podcast instead!
Naming a book is apparently easy for some authors, for me it’s an existential crisis. Thankfully I had book five’s name carved out, and being a twin novel, the titles play off of each other.
When Crystal and I first discussed the art for this one, I knew I wanted something less… identifiable. The prior three books contain their villain, mentor, and mystery, respectively, and for book four I really wanted to capture the faceless quality that oppression can engender. And I wanted to communicate the western angle without necessarily giving away the game like we did with book two's cover, though that was a fun joke in the end.
Q: Without further ado then…
The fourth entry in the Maynard Trigg series is: Maynard Trigg and The Shadow of The Veil.
I'll read you the back matter and blurb in a sec, but I wanted to thank Crystal as ever for taking my nonsense ramblings and composing artwork that captures tone so well. We've had this connection for a decade plus now, and I am always so thankful to have such a talented illustrator on our books. Pun not intended.
Also a huge shout out to Eric Anderson, a fellow author, who has tolerated me peppering him with letters over the last year to help formulate a bunch of ideas that live within this book.
Okay, here we go. The back matter reads as follows:
“The fantastic fourth chapter of Maynard Trigg - the past finally catches up and Maynard must make a choice between his found family, and what is right for the skies.”
Then the blurb is:
“IN THE SKIES ABOVE A LOST WORLD.
The winds grow colder each day on Dead Man’s Wharf. Maynard and Victoria scrape by in the dusty town, dealing with the aloof mayor and prying Quick-Greep Union, all the while hatching a scheme to sneak into The Veil itself.
But one night on the rolling bluffs, a stranger approaches Maynard, and an old ally calls in a favour, forcing Maynard to attempt the impossible: extract a legendary pirate from the greatest prison ever built in the skies.
In the end, Maynard must do whatever he can to succeed, regardless of what, or who, pays the price.”
Maynard Trigg and The Shadow of The Veil is slated to be released in 2026.