Girl in Pieces is the fifth of my stories about a dimension-hopping private investigator. The story begins when a golem bursts into the office of our hero and deposits a girl on the carpet. Unfortunately, she's in pieces. 11,395 of them to be precise.

The big question is - did the golem do it?

The only way to find out for sure is get the girl back together again. But that could be trickier than you think. Especially if you don't like spiders.

This is my favourite of the gumshoe stories so far. It's also the darkest. I started with a single startling image - the golem emptying a garbage can full of body parts on to the PI's carpet - and the whole thing spun itself naturally from there. The zombie cops turned up again and I found a suitably disgusting new villain in the form of Arachne. And the girl? She might be in pieces but, as the PI says, she's a real peach. What more could you want?

And, for the record, actually I quite like spiders.

"... plenty of suspense and action ... I was torn between shuddering at the icky parts, and snickering at the tongue-in-cheek humor" - The Fix

Girl in Pieces links

• Realms of Fantasy