It's a double celebration for Jon Malysiak today as he publishes a double launch in The Templeton Family Chronicles: TRASH (Book Two, new release), set in Beverly Hills, is out now, alongside a relaunch of POSH (Book One, new cover), set in London and Dorset. I'm delighted to be sharing a guest post from Jon but first, here's what the books are about.
Posh
A savage, scandal-soaked satire of the English aristocracy — for fans of Jilly Cooper and HBO's Industry.
Money. Power. Status. Scandal. At Templeton Manor, these aren’t luxuries. They’re weapons. The Steeplechase Weekend is the most exclusive invitation in England: a ruthless social proving ground where influence is currency and visibility is everything. If you’re on the list, you matter. If you’re not, you’re invisible. But this year, the façade is beginning to crack, and what lies beneath is far more dangerous than anyone expected.
Lord Carleton Templeton is dying, and with him slips control of a vast and glittering empire. His new wife, Lady Eliza Brookings—ambitious, austere, and mercenery—stands ready to seize power and drag the dynasty into a new era. The problem is, the Templeton heirs have no intention of letting that happen.
What follows is all-out war: siblings turn on each other, alliances collapse overnight, and every buried secret is weaponised in the fight for control. All the while, PoshTV broadcasts the spectacle to the world, turning private ruin into public entertainment where scandal isn’t a risk, it’s the strategy.
Enter Svetlana Slutskaya—enigmatic, beautiful, and utterly ruthless—arriving with her own agenda and no interest in playing by anyone else’s rules. She hasn’t come to observe the chaos; she’s there to detonate it. As the stakes spiral, power is traded in bedrooms and boardrooms alike, reputations are destroyed for sport, and the fall from the top becomes not just inevitable, but spectacular.
Irreverent, excessive, and completely unfiltered, Posh is a razor-sharp satire of Britain’s elite, where nothing is sacred and no one is safe. If you like your fiction bold, biting, and unapologetically outrageous, this book is for you. You'll either love it or hate it.
Trash
Welcome to Beverly Hills, where the sun isn’t the only thing that burns…
In Trash, the Templeton universe widens as a new cast takes the stage, under the unforgiving sunshine of Southern California.
At its center is Lady MacPherson, Beverly Hills’ leading relationship therapist, whose impeccably curated life begins to crack. Her husband, Dr. Noah Steinman, a newly tenured biochemist at UCLA, is harboring secrets, and nurturing an obsession that could detonate their marriage.
And spiraling through their world is Naomi Wasserman: gorgeous, mysterious, and dangerously unhinged. Her arrival in Beverly Hills
unleashes a wave of seduction, betrayal, and emotional carnage that no one in her orbit will escape.
Meanwhile, back in London, Chloe Templeton – still reeling from Guy’s betrayal – acquires a new assistant who is far from what she seems; and Tessa prepares for her Fashion Week debut as a figure from her past threatens to unravel her carefully crafted identity.
Bold, sharp, and irresistibly entertaining, Trash plunges deeper into the Templeton world where glamour meets madness, excess reigns supreme, and everyone pays the price.
Happy publication day, Jon and many thanks for writing this thoughtful, personal guest post. I lost my own brother suddenly back in 2012 and still miss him, so can appreciate how Colin continues to influence your writing.
The Stories We Leave Each Other
On the eve of publishing Trash, the second novel in The Templeton Family Chronicles this week, I found myself thinking less about book launches, sales, or reviews, and more about why these books exist at all. Trash is, on the surface, a satirical novel. But beneath the absurdity, the humour, and the social commentary lies something much more personal. It's the continuation of a conversation that began more than a decade ago with my brother, Colin: a conversation that, despite his death, somehow never really ended.
The idea that eventually became The Templeton Family Chronicles was born on a hike along the Rainbow Lake Trail in Frisco, Colorado, where Colin lived for more than seventeen years. I can still picture that day with surprising clarity. I remember the mountain air, the pine trees, and the steady rhythm of walking together. I don't remember exactly how the idea arrived, but I remember the conversation that surrounded it. We had been venting, as we often did, about the things that frustrated us about modern life: the absurdities of contemporary culture, bureaucracy, consumerism, and the endless contradictions that seemed impossible to ignore.
Colin, with his wonderfully irreverent sense of humour, floated an idea that immediately caught fire between us: what if we wrote a novel that incorporated and satirised everything we thought was wrong with contemporary society?
That simple question changed the course of the next eight years of our lives.
The series was originally called Dangerous Machinations. From 2014 until not long before Colin suddenly passed away in 2022 from a combination of heart failure and COVID, we built that world together. We created characters, debated plot twists, invented ridiculous scenarios, and spent countless hours imagining where the story might go next. Over time we accumulated well over a thousand pages of notes, outlines, dialogue, and drafts. We had always been close as brothers. But collaborating creatively made us closer still.
There's something deeply intimate about building an imaginary world with another person. You're not simply exchanging ideas; you're learning how each other's minds work. You begin anticipating each other's instincts, and trusting one another completely. Looking back now, I realise those years of collaboration were some of the happiest of our relationship. Which is why losing him felt like losing not only my brother, but also my creative partner.
His death came completely unexpectedly. It knocked the wind out of me.
Grief has an extraordinary ability to rewrite your memories. Alongside the sadness came guilt. I couldn't stop wondering whether I should have done more with the series during those final couple of years. Life had become busy. Careers demanded attention. Like so many creative projects, we assumed there would always be more time.
After Colin died, I found myself asking impossible questions that, rationally, I knew had no answers. Would he still be here if we'd pushed harder? If we'd finally got the series published? If we'd given ourselves one more reason to keep talking every week? Grief rarely concerns itself with logic.
Eventually, though, I realised those questions were leading nowhere. What remained was the work itself. In 2023, I returned to the manuscript of what became Posh. Editing those pages became far more than a publishing project. It became a way of spending time with Colin again. Every joke reminded me of his voice. Every outrageous character carried traces of conversations we'd shared years earlier. Every chapter felt less like something I was writing than something we were finishing together.
Publishing Posh in May 2023 became my tribute to him.
Now, three years later, Trash feels like the next step in honouring that promise.
Last month, my dad and I returned to Frisco. We hiked back to the very trail where Colin and I had first imagined this strange, satirical world together. At a lookout over Lake Dillon, four and a half years after he passed away, we scattered his ashes.
It was a journey that carried another layer of grief. My mother died from cancer last Christmas, and somehow it finally felt like the right time. Beforehand, I worried that scattering Colin's ashes would feel like saying goodbye forever, as though I was somehow abandoning him.
Instead, something unexpected happened. I felt lighter. Not because I miss him any less, but because that place reminded me that the relationship we built wasn't defined by how it ended. It was defined by years of laughter, imagination, and shared purpose. Standing above Lake Dillon, I realised those memories weren't tied to an urn. They had always lived inside the stories we'd created together.
Returning home, I found myself energised in a way I hadn't expected. Almost immediately I began planning the third novel and mapping the remaining books. The vision has now crystallised into a five-book series, just as Colin and I once imagined.
Will the books become bestsellers? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The answer feels strangely unimportant now. Because somewhere along the way, the purpose changed.
I'm no longer writing simply to publish novels. I'm writing to preserve the legacy of someone I loved. The series brought Colin enormous happiness, particularly during periods when, although he rarely admitted it, life could be stressful and lonely. Every page carries something of his wit, his worldview, and his unmistakable sense of humour.
People often speak about creativity as self-expression. I think it's something more powerful than that. Creativity can become a bridge between the past and the present. It gives grief somewhere to go. It transforms absence into purpose.
I still wish Colin were here to see Trash published this week. There isn't a day when I don't wonder what he'd think of the finished book or where he'd want to take the characters next.
But in a strange way, I think I already know. After all, the conversation we started on a mountain trail in Colorado all those years ago is still continuing. Only now, every new chapter is both a story for readers and a love letter to my brother.
Posh and Trash are out now and can be purchased here.
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