I hope you enjoyed a good Christmas. I’m writing this in the weird hiatus between Christmas and New Year (I think it might be Tuesday but couldn’t swear to it) after lots of festive celebrations with family and friends. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’m looking forward to getting back to the desk for a new writing project.
First, here’s a quick newsletter to wish you a very happy start to 2026, share my writing news, and make some recommendations.
Book news
I hope you enjoyed reading about Marjorie Swallow’s Christmas, and thanks to all the readers who got in touch to tell me what they thought of the story. I’m glad it went down well. If you missed it, you can find it via the Readers Club page.
I’m giving Marjorie a break for a while now, as I get started on a new book which I hope will become a series. I don’t want to jinx it by telling you too much, but it will be historical fiction, feature new characters, and be set in London. I’ll tell you more when I’ve made a bit more progress with it. I’m still in the research phase, which is probably my favourite part of writing a book, so doing lots of reading and delving into newspaper archives.
Recommendations
This year I’ve joined forces with twelve historical mystery authors to introduce you to some books you may not have discovered yet. The first on the list is Murder At Merivale Manor by Ella Strike.
Kitty Goring seems to have it all—lavish parties at London’s finest clubs, elegant soirées, and a parade of charming bachelors vying for her hand. But despite the glamour, Kitty longs for something a little more… thrilling.
In a bid for excitement, Kitty dreams up the perfect diversion. A playful mock robbery at her family’s grand estate, Merivale Manor. It’s all meant to be fun—until one of the guests turns up very much dead.
It sounds a lot of fun and I look forward to diving into the series.
As you may remember from my December newsletter, I love a ghost story–and many thanks to the readers who wrote to me with their own chilling or unexplained tales!
The best TV programme I watched over Christmas was Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of the EF Benson short story, The Room in the Tower. Those of you who enjoy EF Benson’s comic Mapp and Lucia stories may think that he simply wrote about fun, but the fun in this story takes a deliciously horrifying turn. A man tells a stranger during a 1940s air raid about a recurrent dream he’s had since teenage years, in which he’s invited to stay with a schoolfriend where the friend’s creepy mother (brilliantly played by Joanna Lumley) tells him he’s been given the room in the tower. Each time he knows something terrible is about to happen…
I won’t spoil it for you, but I will share one thing that made it even more fun for me – the house in the adaptation is Cobham Hall, a manor house in Kent dating back to Elizabethan times, and also a setting for my first novel Unlawful Things. I remember touring the house when I was researching the book, although nothing terrible happened to me!
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