The Fates Do Not Punish

LOST: The Lost City of Incan Gold has won the Gold Medal in the Readers' Favorite 2026 International Book Awards.

I have written that sentence four times now and it still does not look like it belongs to me.

What it actually is

Thousands of entries, from more than a dozen countries. The contest splits into a hundred and forty categories and judges each one separately, so books compete against their own kind rather than against everything at once. Mine went into Young Adult Adventure. It swept the category and won first place.

I want to be plain about the category, because it is the question I have already been asked twice. LOST is not a young adult novel and I am not reclassifying it as one. But a book with a twenty-four-year-old at its center and fifteen-year-old twins beside her, written clean, is going to land in more than one place, and I would rather that be a feature than a confusion. Gold in Young Adult Adventure tells you the useful thing: it can be placed on a teen shelf, and it was written for adults who want the yearning without the spice.

A mother and a fifteen-year-old can read the same copy and both read the whole book. That is what I was trying to make. Somebody outside my own head has now confirmed it works.

The part that got me

The review came before the medal. Keith Mbuya read it for Readers' Favorite, and what stopped me was not the praise. It was what he noticed.

He picked out three scenes: the ball in Ireland where the O'Flahertys scheme over Catalina's future, the sea voyage on stormy water, and the expedition into the Amazon. Those are the three I rewrote the most. He also wrote about feeling the siblings' resentment and fear as they moved through the story, and Cat and Robby are the spine of the whole thing, the part I worried about longest.

Writers work alone for a very long time. You make a thousand decisions nobody will ever see and you have no idea whether any of them landed. Then a stranger reads it properly and names the exact places you bled, and it turns out they were visible after all.

Where this book came from

My great-grandfather was a treasure hunter. He went into the Peruvian Amazon and he never came home.

That is not a plot device. That is my family. I am half Peruvian and half Irish, and LOST is the myth I built out of both halves, Celtic legend braided with Incan, because those are the two stories I was handed. The Incan half is not research. It is inheritance.

Writing it was a reclamation. My family never got closure from my great grandfather’s disappearance. So, I wrote one.

Thank you

To the ARC readers who took a chance on a file from a stranger before anyone had called this book anything. To everyone who bought it off a folding table at a festival while I was tuning a fiddle. To the booksellers who shelved an independent author they had never heard of. To Keith Mbuya, and to Readers' Favorite.

And to the illustrations, my hand-drawn covers and interior scenes have done more to get people to pick this book up than any sentence I have written.

What is next

FORGOTTEN, Book Two, releases in November. Early copies are already travelling with me to festivals this autumn, so if you find me at a table you can have one before anyone else does.

There is apparently an actual medal coming in the post. I will believe it when I am holding it.

The Fates do not punish. They prepare.