Quietly Shining -  A mystery that blends events in contemporary Britain and C19th America. The book won a professional critique on the YouWriteOn.com website, and was subsequenty picked up by Orion. 

Due for publication by Orion in summer 2010.

In the seventh century a Byzantine Emperor, Justinian II, is deposed and mutilated by having his nose and his tongue cut off.  Eight years later, after an arranged marriage with Theodora, an inspirational 'gypsy' princess, he is attempting to regain his throne.  He is helped in this enterprise by an odd collection of adventurers and hangers-on.  We learn the stories of Justinian's principal friends and supporters; who include Michael his ex-Chamberlain from his time as Emperor, his Viking bodyguard, Harald, and most importantly, Honorius, a defrocked monk who is Justinian's spy in Constantinople.  

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Jan and Ali live next door to each other in the two houses belonging to the Family Trust set up by their Grandfather.  They haven’t spoken to each other for twenty years. Following the death of Prudence Lincoln, their much-loved Great Aunt, with implications for the winding-up of the trust, they need to find a way to put aside the long-standing feud.  In the quest to build bridges, the two sisters discover some intriguing aspects of their family history.  As the days pass incidents from the past relate to and explain the present.  This was a family divided by the subtle snobberies of the middle classes, told over thirty days of present conflict reaching back across eighty years and four generations.  The family’s story is played out against a backcloth of the social changes in a London suburb.

NOW PUBLISHED - AVAILABLE VIA AMAZON.CO.UK

In Angel Hill, the disappearance of seven-year-old Cathy Dunn causes a ripple on the calm waters of life in the village. A number of submerged and half-forgotten secrets break the surface. There are few people who are not affected by the spate of disasters that summer. Superstition has no place in a commuter village like Angel Hill. Nonetheless, one magpie is always upsetting and everyone knows that disasters go in threes. To some, for good or ill, life will never be quite the same again.

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Grace’s life is just about perfect, except for one thing. She can’t have the baby she so desperately wants. Then she meets Vicky, the despised half sister she never really knew. Vicky’s life is falling apart as she struggles to find independence from her awful family and to support her young son. In spite of their differences the two sisters become friends and before long they discover that each holds the key to the others happiness.  

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Duncan, the IT contractor brought in to network the system at Willenshaw House, finds himself becoming reluctantly involved in a different kind of networking.  Only Duncan seems to be aware that everything at Willenshaw House is not as it should be.  He has lived too long in the shadow of his more successful older sister and needs to get a life of his own.  Before he can, he must solve a few problems unconnected with computers.

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At the beginning of this adult fairy story, Kathy has married her prince and discovered the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end in the form of a lottery win.  However, living happily ever after is not so easy with the local witch setting out to lure away her prince, who in any case is not all joy to live with.  If only she had recognised the frog (Tim) as her soul-mate earlier on.

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Jack and Candy depicts the changes in life and fortunes of a couple who at the start of the Nineties are happy and successful, living in London in the heyday of Thatcher's Britain. They never had it so good … until Candy's younger sister Joanna arrives, bringing with her memories of another time and place, and more than a hint of future trouble.
Jack and Candy follows the changing fortunes of these three characters through to the new millennium as they struggle to come to terms with the nature of love and success in the modern world.

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Casper's Kingdom is a children's story of 13,000 words. Casper is a small, black and white common moggie, a mixture of independence, charm and sheer perversity. Everyone sees him differently. The four dogs are all under his paw.

With Casper, the reader eavesdrops on the lives played out around him. What Kasper does and where he goes is his own affair and a mystery to the family. Boundaries of time and space have no meaning for him.

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Sad and lonely, Luke travels to Tuscany after the death of his father. He meets the attractive and enigmatic Sylvana and becomes obsessed by her. Their attraction for each other grows but then Luke is shocked to discover that Sylvana is his mother, although she is unaware of this. Devastated that his father had lied to him about her death, he flees to England where he joins the family auction business.

            Ingrid, a talented artist with secrets of her own, contacts Luke, searching for a missing portrait depicting Luke’s mother as the Madonna. Moving in the world of art and antiques, they unwittingly become involved in an art fraud and uncover family secrets and lies.

Bella is barely more than a child when she falls in love with Johnny. She will never forget that last golden summer at the family home, Waterleys Hall before the war changed everything. Believing Johnny to be dead, she makes an unhappy marriage to a rich doctor to save her family from financial ruin. Then Johnny comes home.

Their love remains steadfast over the next fifty years even though the timing never seems right for them to be together. Then a car crash, in which Bella’s second husband dies and her sister is left in a coma, sparks off a chain of events which reveal the secrets of the past to the next generation.

Two years ago Mary Simmons married an Irishman and moved from her London home, first to Dublin, and then to the far west of Ireland. Today she is a widow, alone and confused in the lochside cottage they bought together, trying to deal with the legacy of his suicide, and understand just what it says about their relationship, about the man she believed she knew, and ultimately, about her capacity for love. Conor Moore is adrift, a University drop-out living back on the farm his fore-fathers once worked for the English. His father believes he should never have left. Conor believes there's no way he can stay, to become a prisoner, like his father, freed at last from English rule only to be caged instead by the customs and traditions that seem so meaningless today. The west is dying. Farming is dead. For some, suicide is the only way out. The Waters and the Wild follows the fates of Mary and Conor as they escape across the water to London, to break free from the stagnant world of Dunsheery, in the hope they'll each find answers to the questions suddenly raised by the death of Stewart Donnell.

Work in progress

Harry Cornflower is lost. A private detective, touching forty and fattening nicely into middle-age. That wasn't how it was supposed to be. He'd just taken a wrong turning one day, a while back when it seemed the choices were still his to make, and now he couldn't find another way of looking at things, of getting back on track. And all those alternative paths he'd not taken, for fear of failure or some misguided sense of loyalty, they'd all grown thick with weeds and thorns...

Work in progress