With the announcement that the manuscript for The Hallmarked Man is now (finally!) complete, speculation will inevitably begin as to when the title will finally arrive on the bookshelves. Below I have a table where I’ve been keeping track of the title reveal, manuscript completion, cover reveal and publication day for each Strike title after The Silkworm. I’ve checked the dates against this handy page over at StrikeFans.com.
The later, and longer books take between 221 to 270 days from draft completion to book shelf. The Ink Black Heart is perhaps an outlier with lots of text chat to format, so my guess is the earliest we will see the finished product is 25th July 2025. This is assuming the publishers want to release then. Strike is not an obvious beach read, particularly in its colossal hard-back format. The publishers may want a later publication to appear fresher for the Christmas market.
| Title | Title Reveal | Finished Draft | Cover Reveal | Publication Day | Days from Cover | Days from Draft |
| Career of Evil | 24/04/2015 | 24/04/2015 | 11/06/2015 | 20/10/2015 | 131 | 179 |
| Lethal White | 14/03/2017 | 23/03/2018 | 10/07/2018 | 18/09/2018 | 70 | 179 |
| Troubled Blood | 19/02/2020 | 25/01/2020 | 08/07/2020 | 15/09/2020 | 69 | 234 |
| The Ink Black Heart | 03/12/2021 | 03/12/2021 | 30/06/2022 | 30/08/2022 | 61 | 270 |
| The Running Grave | 12/01/2023 | 17/02/2023 | 19/07/2023 | 26/09/2023 | 69 | 221 |
| The Hallmarked Man | 15/03/2024 | 17/12/2024 | 25/07/2025 ?? |
Hi! This is my chart that I made and posted to Reddit 🙂 Please credit people when you use things!
Sorry babelincoln, I didn’t see your chart on Reddit. But I did see the one on StrikeFans.com, which I used to correct mine, and credited them.
I think they’ll stick with September as the month when the big sellers get published for Xmas – although is Strike a bit different as I suspect most people are buying it for themselves? Still September is the prestige month, so they’ll wait till then, and that also allows the slightly (!) lighter paperback to come out in May/June for the summer readers.
I’m plumping for 1 Sept – closest date wins a Doom Bar, loser gets salted caramels/stargazer lilies according to preference?