Rhys Maren British mystery Novels & Novellas
The Rhys Maren series is an ongoing collection of British mystery novels and novellas written by Cecil Atley. Each story centres on an investigation into forgotten records, unexplained evidence and the hidden stories of ordinary people. They bring together history, archives, old photographs, historical records and modern technology. At the heart of every story is the question of what can still be discovered when someone takes time to examine what has been left behind.
The series moves between the present and the past, with each investigation revealing a different side of the people and events connected to the evidence. These are stories about memory, identity and the way ordinary lives can disappear from the historical record. The mysteries are often rooted in the real world, where the answer may depend as much on understanding a person as it does on understanding the evidence.
About this project
Rhys Maren novellas offer two distinct ways to enjoy each complete mystery. You can follow the serial release by reading a new chapter every Tuesday, for free. Each installment naturally advances the investigation before pausing for the next part.
Or, for readers who prefer uninterrupted reading, the full novella is available to download immediately. It contains the same chapters and conclusions so you can experience the entire story from start to finish at once.
The Rhys Maren Books
- Cost: £9.99
- ASIN: B0HC7G12Y8
- Publisher: Independently published
- Publication date: 30 July 2026
- Language: English
- Print length: 190 pages
- ISBN-13: 979-8189879357
- Book 1 of 1: Rhys Maren
Archives of Ash
A seventeen-year-old boy is accused of murder after a recorded confession appears to prove his guilt. The voice is his. What it proves is another matter.
In this British mystery novel, investigator Rhys Maren follows the digital evidence behind the recording into the world of synthetic voices, artificial intelligence, forgotten archives and a wartime research programme that officially ended more than eighty years ago.
As the evidence unfolds, the investigation becomes deeply personal. Hidden among the missing records is the story of Margaret, Rhys's grandmother, whose service during the Second World War left questions she never answered.
What follows is not simply an investigation into a single piece of technology, but a mystery about memory, family history and the ways the past continues to shape the present. As forgotten lives emerge from historical records and archives, Rhys discovers that evidence survives in places no one thought to look and that some truths can be documented without ever being fully resolved.
Archives of Ash introduces Rhys Maren and the world he inhabits, where history, technology and evidence come together to uncover the hidden stories of the people behind them.
About Archives of Ash
Buy Archives of Ash
The Welsh Archive
When an impossible photograph leads Rhys Maren to a forgotten private archive in North Wales, he discovers a lifetime of images that challenge accepted history and reveal the hidden lives preserved behind the camera.
The Transmission
When a forgotten BBC recording is discovered inside the wall of a demolished broadcasting centre, Rhys Maren is asked to determine whether it is simply an overlooked archive or evidence of a secret Cold War operation that was never meant to survive.
Available from 22nd September 2026
Forget Me Not
When an unexplained act of remembrance at a village war memorial leads Rhys Maren to a forgotten wartime story, he uncovers the quiet determination of one woman to ensure that a life history almost overlooked would never truly be forgotten.
Available from 27th October 2026
Investigating the Lives Hidden in the Evidence
Every investigation begins with something that should not exist. It might be a recording that cannot be explained, a photograph nobody remembers taking, a document found decades after it might have been useful or a digital file that appears to be impossible. There is usually an explanation. The difficulty is finding it.
Those are the investigations that interest Rhys. He generally arrives after the important events have taken place, sometimes many years after, when the people involved are old or dead and much of what once existed has disappeared. What remains may be a box of photographs, a few letters, an old recording or records kept in an archive that nobody has looked at for years.
Rhys works with what survives.
A photograph can tell him quite a lot, although rarely as much as he would like. He may be able to identify where it was taken, roughly when it was taken and perhaps even the camera that took it, while still having no idea who the woman standing in the middle of it was. A letter presents a different problem. He knows what somebody wrote, but he does not necessarily know whether they believed it. Official records are useful until two of them disagree, which happens more often than it should.
Rhys spends much of an investigation putting things together. One record may lead to another. A name can turn up somewhere he did not expect or a date that seemed unimportant on Monday can become useful by Thursday. Some days, of course, they lead nowhere. He has spent enough time tracing the wrong person through census records to know that what looks promising at first does not always turn out to be useful.
Technology has made some of the work easier. Rhys can recover parts of damaged recordings that he would once have had to give up on, and digital files often contain information that is not obvious when they are first opened. Records that used to mean days spent travelling between archives can sometimes be found in an afternoon.
The technology saves time. It does not tell Rhys whether he can trust what he has found. He still needs to know where something came from, who had it before him and what may have happened to it along the way.
Old evidence has usually had a life of its own. Photographs are moved from one box to another. Letters lose their envelopes. Recordings are copied. Somebody writes a name on the back of a photograph twenty years after it was taken and everybody assumes they remembered correctly. Digital files have their own problems, although the mistakes tend to look different.
Rhys is cautious about certainty for that reason. Archives have gaps, memories change and official records contain mistakes. Sometimes the mistake is obvious. Sometimes it sits unnoticed for seventy years because nobody has had a reason to question it.
The smaller things are often worth checking. A date, an address or a few seconds of somebody speaking may eventually connect one record with another. Quite a few of them lead nowhere, of course. That is part of the work too.
Most of the people Rhys encounters were not famous. They had jobs, families, neighbours and ordinary lives. They kept some things and threw others away, usually without considering what a stranger might make of those decisions half a century later. He sometimes finds himself knowing an extraordinary amount about one afternoon in somebody's life and almost nothing about the following thirty years.
Eventually Rhys runs out of records. What remains is the person who left them behind.
Cecil Atley
Grounded in careful research, the Rhys Maren novels explore memory, identity, family history and the search for truth through the lives of ordinary people. Each investigation follows evidence across archives, historical records and modern technology, gradually revealing the people and events hidden behind it.
Rather than relying on conventional detective work or action, Cecil's fiction focuses on observation, research and the patient examination of evidence. At the heart of every Rhys Maren story is the same idea: even the smallest surviving record can uncover a forgotten life and change the way we understand the past.
AI and My Writing
I use generative AI in my writing and I see no reason to hide that.
It is one of several tools I use while developing and editing the Rhys Maren stories. I might use it to test an idea, look at a passage that is not working, check continuity, explore another approach or help with research. It can also be useful when I am working through a character or trying to decide whether something fits the world I have created.
That does not mean I accept what it gives me. Far from it. Suggestions get questioned, changed and quite frequently thrown away. I have detailed guides covering the characters, settings and narrative voices. The decisions about what belongs in a Rhys Maren story remain mine.
There is a human editor involved as well. Every book goes through that process. AI cannot replace it any more than it can replace my own judgement as the writer.
I use AI because it is useful to me. Sometimes it spots something I have missed, sometimes it gives me an idea I would not have considered and sometimes what it produces is completely wrong for the book.
I would rather say openly that I use it than pretend otherwise. It is a tool I choose to use as part of writing the books, not something doing the writing in my place.