Nº 02 · The Stunt · Round one done · Round two underway

The Aegean Dream Resort — a Greek hotel that doesn't exist.

A side project to launch the psychological thriller Deep Blue Lies. We built sixty absurdly detailed collector boxes — designed as if the recipients were checking in to the hotel in the story. A once thriving, but now abandoned Aegean Dream Resort. It was an insane amount of effort and didn't really work. So we did it again, for the Spanish launch too.

Round 01 — 60 boxes · English edition · 2025 Round 02 — Spanish edition · in progress Book — Deep Blue Lies →

The contents of an Aegean Dream Resort collector box arranged on a white surface against the Cantabrian sea — a numbered driftwood room key labelled 'Room 23', a glass jar of Alythos sand, hand-made soap, miniature shampoo and conditioner bottles, and a paperback copy of Deep Blue Lies. — Room 23 (of 60). The contents of the check-in box.

01 — What we did

It all started because I wanted a map in the front of the book. I like maps in the front of books. I don't know exactly how it got so out of control.

Deep Blue Lies is set in a luxury resort on a fictional Greek island. I made a map (actually I made several dozen.) Then I made a postcard. Then a brochure. Then a soap brand for the spa. I was having fun. Then me and the kids started scouring the beach for bits of driftwood that were the perfect size for room keyfobs, which we said had been found on the beach in the novel. Then we sanded them smooth, it took hours, and most of the skin from my knuckles. Then the dog discovered where I'd left them and chewed them all up (the old dog — we had him put down). So we had to do it all again. Somehow the whole thing turned into an ambitious idea to make the best book-launch-boxes ever made, with each item tying back to something inside the story.

02 — The making of the box

Every item ties back to something in the book.

Rafa and Alba kneeling on a wide Cantabrian beach at low tide, sorting through piles of weathered driftwood pieces — keyfob candidates. Loki the Labradoodle stands in the surf behind them, watching.

Room key

Real driftwood, every piece has a story.

I had the idea on the beach one day after finding a piece of wood the sea had shaped almost perfectly into a key fob. Finding another sixty similar pieces took just about forever, but I had helpers. And also a dog who wanted to sabotage the whole affair.

The production line

Laser engraving is very cool.

But it's also very technical, at least I thought so. Each piece was unique, so needed its own digital mapping file, skills I certainly did not possess at the start of the process.

An overhead flat-lay of the box contents in production: small glass jars of Alythos sand with shell tags, a stack of orange origami bookmarks topped with Deep Blue Lies cards, stacks of 'Silk & Rose' Aegean Dream Resort soap, and a row of laser-engraved driftwood room keyfobs — Rooms 46, 59, 33, 47, 16, 41, 42.

Bookmarks

From a long list.

The decision to make sixty origami bats to put at the top of the bookmarks is probably the one I regret the most. No one uses bookmarks anyway. It's all folding the corners down, or breaking the spine. Or using a tatty old receipt.

A small square glass jar of Alythos sand with a cork stopper, sitting on a wet Cantabrian beach. Tied to its neck by twine, a kraft-card tag with a single white shell pinned to it — the shell has a neat round hole drilled clean through by an octopus.

The clue

"Is this a clue… to a murder?"

My favourite bit. Every glass jar of sand came with this little card and a single shell with a hole in it, drilled by an octopus. You find them occasionally on the beach round here. Finding sixty was fun.

The brand

The Aegean Dream Resort. Built from scratch.

Sort of. I know. Logo, livery, lobby — the resort had to feel like somewhere a real guest could actually check in. I designed the wave-and-sun mark, then the brochure, then the welcome letter, then the bathroom amenities. A 28-page guest guide written in-character as Jason Grant, the centre manager from the novel. Equal parts welcome and warning.

A pile of hand-made artisan soap blocks stamped with 'DEEP BLUE LIES', resting in and around an olive-wood dish on a woven reed mat.

The soaps

A gift from the spa.

Hand made, cold pressed. The packaging — by law — had to include a list of ingredients, and the place of manufacture, which wasn't allowed to be Alythos island from the novel, because it doesn't actually exist. We got around it by putting the actual place of manufacture (an artisan soap maker here in Spain), all written in Greek script.

Photography

The brochure shoot.

Another of my jobs in a previous life was shooting the brochure for various holiday companies I worked for. It was fun, but making this absurd version was more fun.

Alba, head down in concentration, decanting Metaxa from a hip-flask sized vessel into a row of miniature spirit bottles lined up on the kitchen table.

The mini-bar

Miniatures. Hand-decanted by a teenager.

The hotel has a mini-bar. So the box needs a mini-bar. Right? We weren't allowed to put these in the English boxes because of Brexit and US tariffs. But we put it right for the Spanish version and had some left over to celebrate. Alba didn't. She's too young.

Gregg and his two kids sitting behind a long table, each holding a copy of Deep Blue Lies. The table is laid out with eighteen open collector boxes, each containing the book, an artisan soap, a numbered driftwood room key, and a small jar of sand. Behind them, the family living room. — Production line packing. Alba, me, Rafa — and just a few of the sixty boxes, mid-pack.

03 — A bit of fun

All slightly weird. All still online.

The brochure, the feedback form, the spa liability waiver. All written in-character as if the hotel were real. The brochure works best on a laptop or iPad — it was designed for A5.

PDF · 28 pages

The Aegean Dream Resort brochure

The full guest brochure. Welcome letter, room photography, spa menu, "things to do" — all 28 pages of it, exactly as it appeared in the box.

Open the brochure →

Form · in-character

Guest feedback form

If you stayed with us, please tell us how it went. Especially the bits that survived.

Open the form →

Waiver · please sign

Spa liability waiver

The spa is, in some senses, complimentary. We do however need you to acknowledge a few things.

Open the waiver →

04 — Did it work?

Sort of. Maybe. Probably not.

The plan was to send these to the top book influencers on TikTok and Instagram, so they'd unbox them for their followers, and millions of people would hear about the book, go out and buy it, and we'd park up our new Superyacht next to JK Rowling's. The top influencers either didn't reply or wanted twelve hundred dollars for fifteen seconds in front of a camera. So I had sixty handmade boxes and no idea what to do with them.

Plan B became: give them away to readers. We ran competitions on Facebook and Instagram asking people to share the idea for a chance to win a box, and thousands entered. And people really liked them — which was very nice. But it ended up being our least successful launch in years — so go figure.

The new Deep Blue Lies cover — bold blue with white serif type, a woman in a wide-brimmed sun hat looking out from the edge of an infinity pool. — The new cover. Blue.

One big problem we worked out afterwards: the book cover probably wasn't right. Deep Blue Lies and a… green book? We've since changed that, which is helpful but also annoying, having gone to so much trouble on the old one.

05 — Round two

We're doing it again. In Spanish.

The Spanish translation of Deep Blue Lies published after the English version, giving us the chance to run the project again, but making fewer mistakes this time. We hope. It's too early yet to see if it works this time. But the new boxes look pretty.

Lo Que Oculta El Mar. Spanish edition. Box № 56, photographed above Playa de Liencres.

The novel · Out now

Read Deep Blue Lies.

The book the hotel was built around. Paperback, ebook, audio (read by Katie Villa), Kindle Unlimited.