Mrs Farrell’s Christmas Cake
When I was a child – without fail – November smelled of cinnamon, nutmeg, jewel-bright candied carbuncles of citrus peel, and rich, shiny brandy. My mother baked Christmas cakes then for a mid-December delivery. It was a skill she’d acquired at a women’s club in the...
Deadly Election: A Love Story with Murders
Lindsey Davis first novel was published in 1989, after a historical romance she’d written was rejected. The research she’d done for “The Course of Honour,” the (then) unpublished romance set in the court of Vespasian played on her mind, resulted in her creation of...
Byte And Me
Those lovely people at Byte The Book have posted a piece I've written about My journey to Publication and my thoughts on Networking. Check it out here and - if you're at all interested in publication, seriously consider joining Byte. Worth every penny.
The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes: A Sweaty Floridian Ibsen. WIth Anal.
Lawrence Block has been writing since God was in his heaven and Kennedy in the White House. That he’s had an esteemed career goes without saying. He’s written slight pulpy books (After the First Death), Bigger City-wide Blockbusters (the counterintuitively named Small...
“The Grown Up” Reviewed. – Nothing is what it seems…
As with all Gillian Flynn stories, it's extremely difficult to discuss the plot of this without giving away spoilers. Suffice to say that, in this story, nobody and nothing is what they seem. It purports to be a ghost story, but even that is uncertain. It purports to...
On Murder
I’ve come, over the past week or so, to realise that the best murder mysteries are, ultimately, about serial killers. Not, necessarily, the Gory Hannibal Lecter type of serial killers; even the classic Agatha Christies, for example, seem to work even better when the...