Here’s the letter I sent out in September 2025 to newsletter readers who played my scavenger hunt & tracked down Witch of the Wolves.
Hey, so you found my new book! I suspect that once you saw it, you could tell that I’m not really trying very hard to hide 🙂 I picked a name similar to my own (Kelley/Kaylee Armstrong/Archer) and if you checked out “Kaylee’s” Instagram or website, you’ll have seen that her bio pic is an illustration of me with my pets, done by my wonderful longtime artist, Xaviere Daumarie.
About the Book
If you’ve heard me talk in the past, you’ll know that I was very adamant that the Otherworld was over. As time passed, though, I had the urge to return to that world. My answer to that question slowly changed to something like “I wouldn’t return to those characters, but I might do something new with the world.” Then it shifted to “I might do something historical with the world.” When the 25th anniversary arose on the horizon and there was no publisher interest in an anniversary edition, I wrote Witch of the Wolves.
Blunt honesty, I love the Otherworld characters, but going back there after over a decade is too daunting for me. I’d need to reread everything and I’d still struggle to recapture it correctly. Revisiting the world with all new characters was exactly what I needed. The pen name means I can even tweak the world if the rules and history I established interfere with the stories.
So what should you expect if you decide to give it a try? Pretty much what you saw with the Otherworld. To me, urban fantasy was always 75% thriller, 25% romance. Witch of the Wolves might be more like 35% romance, but the “threat” part is still my focus, with high stakes, action, betrayals and bloodshed.
Links with the Otherworld
- the main character, Cordelia, is a Levine witch
- the male lead is a Danvers. Bishop and his cousin Julius go by “Daniels” because, um, “Danvers” may be a problematic surname in this time period. That’s explained in the book
- Cordelia’s paternal surname is Stockwell, which isn’t in the Otherworld. It was originally Stillwell (connecting her to Joey Stillwell), but I decided to change it to something new
- we also have Cains in the Pack and they’re just as nasty as ever (apologies to poor Derek from the Darkest Powers series) There is a much better one in The Wolf Queen’s Curse as a new series character
- The Wolf Queen’s Curse has a Marsten, though we don’t get his name until book 3
- we also may have a redhaired necromancer, and in my canon, she’s definitely an ancestor of Jaime Vegas
- there is one supernatural type from the modern Otherworld who could appear in this one: the vampires. Zoe Takano appears in book 3, as a relatively new vamp
Fun Facts
- the seat of the English Pack is called Trevelyan, which was actually the name of Stonehaven of the very first draft of Bitten, when Jeremy was English and lived outside London
- I don’t call it the English Pack, though it is called that in the Otherworld series. Here it’s the Albion Pack. There’s also a Caledonian Pack (Scottish), Hibernian Pack (Irish) and Cambrian Pack (Welsh) There’s a lot of politics and history between the regions, and I worried about bringing those associations into the British Pack dynamics if I used English Pack etc.
- Cordelia is a lycan, which is a new concept. It means that she inherited some secondary werewolf characteristics from her father. We don’t see this in the Otherworld, but my canon would be that it did exist, though it’s very rare (as is mentioned here)
- If you have read my Stitch in Time or A Rip Through Time series, you’ll notice the language in Witch of the Wolves sounds more modern. I actually wrote the dialogue and narrative in the more historical-sounding style, and then I completely redid it. I see this series more as a fantasy version of our world, and the modernized style sounded better for me