WHEN it comes to book titles Colchester's Edward Cox really does come up with some corkers.

While The Relic Guild was suitably enigmatic to start off his fantasy trilogy, he then followed that up with The Cathedral of Known Things and then the last in the series, The Watcher of Dead Time.

Although Edward started writing the trilogy more than eight years ago, the release of all three have come out rather quickly with the mass market paperback release of Cathedral taking place in May and third and final one coming out last month.

Edward says: "It's actually been a little less than a month since it came out and it's already on its second print run so I'm really pleased with the response.

"When the second book came out the reviews were mainly good but I suspect people were waiting to see how the story turned out which is why the third book has been so well received.

"I'm really proud of the third book, tying together all the different plot threads. It was a bit like kicking all the balls into the back of the net, it was very satisfying."

Born in Forest Gate, Edward moved to Tiptree with his family when he was eight years old.

He began writing stories at school as a way to pass time in boring lessons.

Later after several jobs, Edward, who now lives in Colchester, went to university earning a first class honours degree in creative writing as well as a masters before going on to teach creative writing at the University of Bedfordshire.

His first publication was a story called Dream Queen in 1999 and since then Edward has had between 50 and 100 short stories published on-line, mainly in the US.

But it was at the end of his masters that Edward had a version of what would become the Relic Guild.

In the Relic Guild a young girl has to reunite the last of a secret band of magickers called the Relic Guild and together they must find a way to save one million humans from an age-old menace that is about to return.

Now that he's finished his trilogy, Edward is working on his next project, a stand alone novel.

He says: "I had always wanted to write something like The Relic Guild, a sprawling story over three books, but it took a really long time to do it and after the third book was done I thought about doing something a little more immediate."

The Relic Guild, The Cathedral of Known Things and The Watcher of Dead Time are all published by fantasy specialist publisher, Gollancz, and available in all good bookshops.