Storytelling in the blood

I’m from a line of women storytellers. Unlike my foremother’s, who spun oral yarns to
entertain, I write mine down. Unlike so many of them, I can.

My writing life began while I was still teaching. What started as a short memoir, to pass the
time as I languished with a broken bone, has turned into a compulsion. I’ve now completed
4 novels with several others in progress. Something had to give and it was the teaching.
Fortunately, I’m married to a fierce and discerning French accountant, who not only
believes in my writing but supports my crazy dreams and actively abets me creatively.

In this, I am blessed.

The memoir (The Things You Do) and the first novel (The Saddest Sound, a serial killer
story based loosely on Peter Sutcliffe but told from the perspective of the victims and
survivors) are both available online and from Lepus Books. Lepus is a small indie
publishing cooperative.

My second novel (The Portrait of Adie Denton) is a historical love story set amongst the
lesbian demi-monde of the 1920s. It found an agent (Caroline Hardman) and since then
I’ve been on a quest to reach that holy grail; a proper publishing deal.
In the book that followed, I returned to crime. The Bones of Him is set in my home town;
Northampton. Death in Paradise, it is not. More like Death in Urban Squalor. The crime
story is a cold-case whodunnit but actually this is a façade, as Hitchcock has it the
MacGuffin, masking an exploration of family and character. It’s been highly praised by
those who’ve read it but I’m told one-off crime books don’t sell. So…

My most recent work is the first of a series; Dead Centre. Set in Northampton again, its
title refers to the town’s geographical and spiritual location. Detective Sergeant Jez Flint
takes on a baffling case which focusses on the nature of victimhood against a backdrop of
rageous interpersonal relationships in a disintegrating society.
I’m hoping this one hits the mark but while I’m waiting, Jez Flint book 2 is underway