I’m pleased to announce that my third book The People’s Republic of Love will be available next year from the world’s first climate-positive publisher, SRL Publishing. Here’s a bit about the book: Tamsin, a shy tunnel engineer, is quietly supportive when her best friend Charlotte becomes a contestant on a new reality TV series. But…
The creative process. The writer’s methodology. Inspiration versus perspiration. Whatever words you want to use. But as a writer you will know that there are two distinct facets to your writing life. Loosely termed, they are the creative and the craft. I’m not saying anything that any writer doesn’t already know, but having been entrenched…
This latest update is quite an exciting one. The DI Crow series is currently going through a revision, and Her Last Chance, The Killing Ground and A Fatal Pact will be back on Amazon over the coming weeks, in collaboration with a fantastic Bristol-based publisher, Malago Press. It’s great to see my favourite detective published…
11 July 2024 marks 30 years since I lost my dad. It’s also the birthday of the character in the novel I started to write immediately afterwards. I’m now, for various reasons, rewriting that novel.
Since I finally ‘came out’ as a crime writer last spring, with the publication of Her Last Chance, the first in the DI Crow crime thriller series, the questions I’ve been asked most by those who know me is, ‘Where did the urge to write crime come from?’ usually followed by ‘What on earth goes on in your head?’ After all, once I yank my leopard print shopping trolley out of the cupboard and head off to the local supermarket, the only crime-busting hero I remotely resemble is Miss Marple.
Most of the time authors carefully select their settings, but sometimes the story just revs its engine and takes you off to who-knows-where. Hence I found, completely by accident, this one little scene in The Undoing of Arlo Knott setting itself at an old workplace of mine – Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.
After lots of work and a long journey, and tons of support from the brilliant team at Inkubator Books, Detective Inspector Al Crow is finally ready to take on his first shift in the outside world.
A little about my third book, which takes me in a new direction, and into some potentially treacherous waters… In this novel, a bunch of private Caribbean islands band together to create a brand new nation, the ‘People’s Republic of Love’, governed by the citizen with the most followers on social media.
Like many community groups, we powered down a bit during the pandemic. Meetings happened on zoom, then sometimes outdoors when it was permitted, then back to zoom, and now we are in a hybrid world of mostly meeting in person but with the option of joining via laptop. It is interesting how writers have been…
We’re back! Yes like most other people we’ve been quiet for a while, but we have been busy too. We’ve watered our gardens, we’ve baked our bread and zoomed from time to time but we’ve also changed things and done things, so welcome to our new name and web presence. No special reason, just time…