Three novels, and the same man turns up in all of them.
Henry Clarke
Henry Clarke is in Janus Origin: Threads of Control (paperback ISBN 1068476303, £12.99), The Other Lotus Girl (106847632X, £11.95) and The Cuckoo House (ebook, £3.99). He is not the same size of presence in each.
In Janus Origin he is the money behind the project. Another character calls him 'a second-rate scientist from a rich family... a very rich pompous prat, and he helped fund our secret little project'. Owen Prescott, reviewing on Amazon on 21 October 2025, singled out that end of the cast: 'Marcus and Ollie added great depth and personality to the story.'
In The Other Lotus Girl he arrives by phone in chapter sixteen, funding Sandra Marsh's journalism, with what she calls 'a particular interest in Vietnamese trafficking'. He turns up in person in chapter twenty, which is named after him: sixty, grey hair cut perfectly, Savile Row, a public school voice, a table booked for seven at a Notting Hill steakhouse. He looks at Vân and stops for a beat. 'Something crossed his face. Gone in a second.'
In The Cuckoo House he means to stand for Hartley's seat in Parliament and win it. He also employs Tony Cortilo, and kept him out of prison after the newspaper business in the first book.
Sandra Marsh
Sandra Marsh is in two of them. In The Other Lotus Girl she is the investigative journalist Henry funds, working off walls of maps with pins and string. She takes one look at them all in her lounge and says, 'Fuck, you lot look like shit'. She comes back in The Cuckoo House, out of what she did in the first one.
The Cortilos
Tony Cortilo hands out business cards in The Other Lotus Girl. Danny Cortilo runs the county-lines operation in The Cuckoo House and calls it an arrangement, twice.
Most of the household carries over between those two books. Ashton Clark, Goodreads, 21 July 2026: 'A haunting follow-up to The Other Lotus Girl, The Cuckoo House reunites readers with married couple, Stuart and Martin; Martin's mouthy and somewhat homophobic (but she is growing!) mother-in-law, Barbara; the nosy next-door neighbor and IT Consultant, John.'
There is also a place. Janus Origin opens in a café on the Flag Market in Preston. At the end of The Other Lotus Girl, Henry Clarke says he has to go to Preston. 'Urgent business. Someone I need to take care of. Of all the fucking places.' A moment earlier he starts saying a name and stops himself: 'Before I have to go and meet Mar-'. He does not finish it, and the book does not tell you who that is.
Reading order
Reading order. Janus Origin: Threads of Control comes first and Janus Origin: Red River Secrets follows it, paperback ISBN 1068476346 at £12.99. The Other Lotus Girl and The Cuckoo House are the other pair, in that order. Rubie C, NetGalley, 21 July 2026, on the second one: 'I picked this book up because the premise of two sisters fighting to reunite after surviving unimaginable trauma immediately caught my attention.'
Janus Origin also has a hardback, 1068476311 at £18.99. The Other Lotus Girl has a full-cast audio drama on YouTube, free, ten episodes in so far and still going.
