Lucca, Italy, 23rd September 2017: The Struts, fronted by Luke Spillers who is surely the love child of Freddie Mercury and Ian Astbury, have done an excellent job of keeping us entertained for thirty minutes and have just left the stage. And then it begins; Woo-woo…woo-woo…woo-woo…woo-woo. A whisper that soon becomes a roar. Like 55,000 owls, […]
I’ve just read and thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Girlfriend’ by Michelle Frances, published by Pan Macmillan. It’s a psychological thriller with the ‘thriller’ aspect ramping right up in the last third of this uncomfortable yarn. The premise is simple. Ambitious working class gold digger sets out to ensnare a wealthy husband. This seems eminently possible when […]
Extract from Seeking Eden Chapter 8 : Regrets After breakfasting on eggs Benedict in the hotel’s elegant atrium, Kate and Neil pulled on walking boots and set out for the forest. ‘I think autumn will come early this year, don’t you?’ Kate said. ‘Maybe it just feels that way because we don’t want summer to […]
July 6th dawned much like any other in our house. By 5.00am my workaholic partner Mark was bound for the red-eye to Glasgow, leaving me and our terrier Brodie to doze for another hour or so. My waking thought was ‘Whoopee! Today’s publication day for Seeking Eden!’ But it’s hard to get excited on your own. […]
When I was 28, I wrote my first novel. It was garbage, littered with clichés, adverbs and flowery similes. I printed one copy, then put it away – in the round filing cabinet that lives under my desk. Roll forward twenty four years and I had another stab at it. This one was better, but […]
I was recently emailed by a lady asking if I still had my terrier cross, Brodie. She’d read my rather bleak post in February, shortly after I’d rescued him from the amazing Foal Farm in Kent, and after tuning in to my website at regular intervals and finding no further posts on the subject, […]
I’m very blessed that my partner is a talented graphic artist and web designer slash builder. I’m even luckier that however busy Mark is, when I need a website or page, he loyally puts me at the top of his massive To Do list. For this, and for so many other daily acts of kindness, […]
Sometimes, when a book (or a film) is accompanied by much hyperbole, the event itself can be a letdown; not so in the case of Mark Mayes’s exquisite debut novel, The Gift Maker. The book’s blurb is an accurate teaser of what you’re getting so I won’t regurgitate it here. Instead, I can say that […]
Dancers in the Wind is a classic thriller in the mould of Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect. It could be that I was reminded of the series because it is set in London’s King’s Cross in the early nineties – an era when this part of London was a world away from the chichi urban […]
The last few weeks have been a bag of mixed blessings; the rough with the smooth, the yin with the yang (insert your own cliché here). Still raw from the passing of our beloved old dog Rodney, after new year the Boyf and I returned to the shelter Rodney came from, hoping to adopt another […]