We can surely all think of great book series that have become games. Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Harry Potter. Games that have become books, however, while not unheard of, are certainly more of a rarity.

The folks behind hidden-object game June’s Journey are teaming up with cosy-mystery author Carlene O’Connor to create a new trend. This March, they are publishing their first murder mystery, Death Wasn’t Invited.

“June is a great character – our players love her,” says Ben O’Donnell, game director at Wooga, the studio behind the game. “It seemed a shame for her not to be a household name, like Sherlock Holmes.”

“You always want your protagonist to be just like June. You want them smart, kind but also adventurous and maybe willing to bend the rules for the greater good,” says O’Connor (real name Mary Carter).

“June’s all of those things. She also has this incredible background; she comes from money, but it’s not advertised. She’s well educated, beautiful – all the things that are really fun to embody in a character.”

For anyone who is not familiar, June Parker, the protagonist of June’s Journey, is a stylish 1920s-socialite-turned-amateur-detective who sets about untangling a web of family secrets while trying to uncover the real story about her sister’s murder.

As June travels the world in pursuit of the truth, your role as the player is to search the gorgeous scenes for concealed objects that serve as clues in her investigation. When you complete levels, you unlock new chapters of the mystery.

Fertile ground, then, on which to build a murder-mystery novel.

“People love the game, because they’re immersed in a world and in a journey. I think books are very similar – you want to take the reader on a journey – so it really does dovetail nicely,” says O’Connor.

In the book, readers will find June in Paris, heading to an engagement party with her friends Nate and Jack. Unbeknownst to June, Nate intends to stop the marriage, but before he can execute his plan, he is executed instead. Jack is under suspicion for murder – and June must clear his name.

O’Connor is best known for her Irish Village Mystery series, which have made her a USA Today bestselling author. She may never have previously adapted a game into a book, but this, she says, “just falls into my backyard”.

“My main characters are always women, it’s my natural instinct to want to write women,” O’Connor says. “There are also so many male protagonists that dominate stories out there that I like to even the playing field a little.”

The majority of O’Connor’s readers are also women – as is the majority of the game’s player base.

While the book narrative occurs in 1922, prior to the game’s timeline, it will still pollinate gameplay during the month of publication. Players will search for clues that tie in with the novel’s locations, collect Parisian landmarks and take on a brand-new Mission to locate June’s hat, which goes missing in the book.

The characters of the book, including June’s friend Nate and Jack, her love interest, will also make appearances in the game’s limited-time Secrets storylines, giving players additional backstory to the events of the book.

For O’Connor, the process of writing in collaboration with a games studio was a new experience.

“Writing can be so isolating and lonely sometimes – there are many times I wish I had a team of people,” she says. “Now I have been able to have that experience.”

O’Connor worked with game writers Zach Parker and Elizabeth Vail to craft the story.

“I was a little awkward with it at first,” she admits, having first encountered the game when Wooga approached her with an initial idea for a book.

“I’d throw out a plot and they would say, ‘Oh, we’ve done that.’” June’s Journey was released in 2017 and has covered a lot of storyline in that time.

Once they landed on the perfect plot line, “We really hit our stride and enjoyed ourselves.”

So, for any fans of the game who decide to read the book, O’Connor assures them: “Players can expect to have an uninterrupted experience of the characters they know and love, but also a little background from before the game starts, that reveals a bit more about June.”

So can we expect a sequel, or maybe June’s Journey: The Movie next?

“I’m very much open to whatever the future brings,” says O’Connor. Game director Ben O’Donnell is even more strident: “We’ll definitely be considering it!”