Mystery and thriller author
I’m excited to be taking part in the 2026 Walmer Castle Book Fair next weekend. I’ll be on the author’s pop-up stage on the lawn at 1pm on Sunday June 14, talking about how I write my historical mystery books, and answering audience questions. I’ll also be signing books during the rest of the fair on Sunday. If you’re in the area, why not come and say hello?
Walmer Castle is managed by English Heritage.
I’ve been off on my travels this month and I’m packing the suitcase again for a trip to beautiful Florence next week. I’ve also been enjoying some lovely spring weather in the UK, including a gorgeous walk with friends in the Kent countryside.
I also took a trip to see family in Wales, which is right on the other side of the country. I have a step-granddaughter on the way, so I was very excited to spend time with the parents-to-be ahead of the happy event this summer.
I’ve managed to squeeze in a bit of writing, too. The new book is well underway at 30,000 words. Now, if I was writing a Marjorie Swallow book, I’d say I was halfway through, but this one is going to be longer. I’m aiming for 90,000 words, which seems like a good length for a thriller.
Read on for all the usual news, recommendations and offers.
Rosie Hunt has a new mystery out, Murder on the Motor Track.
England, 1923. Celebrated sleuth Lady Felicity Quick has never shied away from scandal. But becoming a racing driver? With her wedding fast approaching, Felicity should be choosing flowers, not flying around hairpin bends.
But a bereaved brother’s plea for justice summons her to the notorious Tor Vale circuit, where former flying aces risk their lives at every turn. Someone sabotaged the last fatal crash — and as the racers strive for the trophy, the killer is poised to strike again.
Can Felicity unmask the killer before the championship race? Or will a wrong turn send her off the track — permanently?
May’s Mystery of the Month is a new author to me, Cassie Rush, with The Secret Society.
London, 1925. Lady Barbara ‘Bundle’ Ridgewell is carving out a new life in Mayfair while her husband, Lord Edmund Ridgewell, reluctantly takes his seat in the House of Lords. When a party invitation introduces Bundle to Dr Samuel Cunningham — a charming archaeologist with a mysterious Egyptian relic and tales of ancient curses — she’s intrigued. When she finds him murdered in his Soho flat, she’s appalled. Where will the investigation take her?
Murder On Fleet Street should be available soon for those who prefer to read with their ears. I signed it off at Audible this morning, and I have to say, Kim has done a brilliant job. Whisper it, but this might be my favourite of the Marjorie Swallow books, and Kim’s narration is spot on. She even made me laugh at my own jokes while I did the quality assurance check!
You should be able to find it on Audible and Spotify very soon.
Finally, I’m taking part in the Mayday Giveaway on Bookfunnel this month, where you can find plenty of new reading matter to fill up your e-reader. Check them out here.
Have a marvellous May, and happy reading!
I’m in my happy place this week – getting stuck into the first draft of the new book. After all the research and planning, there’s something very satisfying about starting to write. The first 10,000 words is written and I’ve submitted the two opening chapters to my writing group for their verdict next week.
March was busy month. I had fun meeting readers at Beckenham Book Fayre (hello again to everyone who came along!) and other members of the Alliance of Independent Authors as part of London Book Fair.
I even spent a day in the office! I work freelance as a medical editor, and for the first time in about 6 years I went into offices in Fitzrovia, London, to meet my colleagues in person. It was a bright, sunny day and I had fun afterwards wandering the streets around Soho, thinking about where to site the offices of my fictional spies. I even found time for a haircut (a good haircut makes me feel like a new woman!).
Read on for audiobook news, a new independent author bookstore, and some fantastic new book recommendations.
April is Indie Author Month, and to help celebrate, the wonderful people at the Alliance of Independent Authors have launched a new online book shop.
The Alliance does great work to help independent authors bring their books into the world. I’ve found their advice invaluable and they are my first recommendation when friends ask me about independent publishing.
So it’s fitting that they are bringing together all the books by Alliance members in one place, the Indie Author Bookstore. You can have a good browse and buy from whichever outlet the author links to. All of my books are there, and you can browse by genre. You’re sure to find something different and interesting.
I have two new cozy mysteries to tell you about this month, from two favourite authors.
First up, A Very Irish Mystery is book 26 (!) in the Lady Eleanor Swift series, and (you’ve guessed it) takes us to Ireland, where Eleanor is having a grand time cosying up with her husband in Dublin’s traditional pubs, eating Irish stew and soaking up the craic… Until another body ruins all their plans!
A tour of a brewery making Ireland’s famous black stout results in the discovery of a body in a barrel – and it belongs to the owner of the brewery. Can Eleanor catch the killer? It’s published on April 10.
Next, it’s Ella Strike’s latest Kitty Goring novel, The Scarab Society Murders. When Kitty sets sail aboard the RMS Mooltan to Alexandria, what should be a glamorous adventure turns deadly. A guest is found murdered, and the killer is hiding among the glittering passengers.
Armed with her keen mind, a scrappy little dog named Scottie, and her circle of eccentric friends, Kitty must navigate high society and treacherous waters to uncover the culprit before they strike again.
With spring around the corner, gardeners’ thoughts turn to the upcoming Chelsea Flower Show, held every May in London’s Chelsea Royal Hospital.
If you haven’t read Death At Chelsea, my Marjorie Swallow book set at the Chelsea show, it’s going to be on offer at 99p/99c with Kindle from Wednesday 15 to Sunday 19 April. It’s also available as an audiobook.
Talking of which, my narrator Kim is working on the next in the series, so Murder On Fleet Street should be available soon for those who prefer to read with their ears.
Hello from a cold and rainy seaside, where the latest storm battered the coast all night. My flat faces onto the North Sea, so takes the full force of the wind, rattling the windows while the rain lashes down.
I’m been keeping snug inside, getting on with research for the next book and signing off the audiobook of The Riviera Mystery. I was thrilled with how beautifully my narrator Kim Bretton has read the story, despite all the difficulties I threw at her with French accents! You can find it now in Audible, and very soon on Spotify and the other platforms.
Read on for more about the work in progress, recommendations and promotions.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the British Library this month, trawling through the archives and reading up about one of my favourite parts of London: Soho.
I’ve already explored London’s ‘square mile of sin’ before, in The Soho Jazz Murders, and to some extent in my second thriller, The Peacock Room. But this time I’m looking at Soho’s more recent history, in the middle of the 20th century when it was first the centre of 1950s bohemianism, and then where the Swinging Sixties swung hardest.
What’s it about? Well, you might want to look at my recommendations below for some hints as to what’s on my mind!
With rain, storms and cold weather to contend with, I’ve spent more time than usual watching TV and listening to audiobooks.
I loved The Night Manager when it first aired ten years ago, with its glamorous locations and slippery treachery. At first I was unsure about the second series, which seemed to lack some of the bite of the first. But I was soon well and truly hooked, and the final episode didn’t disappoint.
Talking of slippery treachery, I’ve also been hooked on the BBC’s brilliant reality TV show The Traitors. It might be the best series yet. When crime writer Harriet Tyce seemed to have cracked the case, I thought she was going to win – but apparently she’s seen a huge increase in sales of her psychological thrillers, so I’m sure she’s happy anyway. And wasn’t that finale a nail-biter?
My final treacherous recommendation is for the audiobooks of John le Carré’s George Smiley series, narrated by the brilliant British actor Simon Russell Beale. Starting with Call for the Dead and continuing with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the series is grippingly believable. Le Carré was also the author of the book on which the first series of The Night Manager was based – I’m all about spies at the moment!
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.
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.
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!
Have you ever seen a ghost? I don’t think I have, but I am haunted by one all the same, in my flat by the sea. December, with its long dark nights, seems the right time to share ghost stories, preferably around the fire with a glass of something warming! Read on for the full story.
And talking of stories, I have news of my annual Christmas story, a little look at what you might have found under the tree in the 1920s, a Christmas walk to share, plus the usual book recommendations and promotions.
My apartment by the seaside is on the second floor of a big house built in the 1840s, with lovely high ceilings, bay windows, cornices and mouldings. It was divided into flats sometime in the last century. But you can see how it fitted together as one big house. When we had some building work done in our kitchen, the workmen uncovered the top of a boxed-up narrow staircase leading down to the ground floor. They covered it up again, of course, and it’s now under the floorboards and kitchen tiles. It was probably the ‘back stairs’ used by household staff.
But shortly after that discovery, my writing group was challenged to write a ghost story. I used the hidden staircase in my story. I imagined walking into the kitchen to see a girl dressed in a black-and-white maid’s uniform, descending the stairs and disappearing into the floor. In the story, as she reached neck-height, she turned and gave me a malicious smile, as if she knew something terrible was going to happen.
The trouble is that ever since, whenever I pass the kitchen to go to the bathroom at night, I have to turn the lights on to make sure she’s not there. That’s the problem with having a writer’s imagination – I can scare myself half to death with imaginary ghosts. I do realise this is a ridiculous state of affairs. So, here’s a tip: if you are going to write a ghost story, don’t set it in your own house!
The invitations have been sent out, Mrs Smithson is cooking honey-roasted ham and mince pies in the kitchen, the All Stars Jazz Orchestra are tuning up and Marjorie is decorating the Christmas tree with a little help (or hindrance) from the new housemaid. Mrs Jameson’s detective agency in Bedford Square is all set for a wonderful Christmas Eve party. If you’ve read the Marjorie Swallow books, you’ll recognise plenty of the guests–and here’s nice Mr Rubin the diamond merchant, with a pile of expensive-looking presents. Let’s hope nothing happens to them…
I’m putting the finishing touches to Marjorie Swallow’s Christmas, a short story which I’ll be sending you on Christmas Eve to read with a glass of mulled wine and a mince pie, when all the present-wrapping and tree-decorating is done. Look out for it on Christmas Eve morning.
While preparing the story, I enjoyed researching the sort of presents you might have found under the tree in the 1920s. The British Newspaper Archive, one of my favourite sources of information, had a handy blog about the top 10 presents. So, are you ready?
1: A handkerchief. ‘There are no more acceptable gifts…than handkerchiefs,’ according to The Sphere, in December 1920. Walpole’s Irish Linens agree.
2: A pencil. ‘Everybody loves good pencils, and has a use for them,’ says The Sphere. I may be one of the few people in 2025 who would love a box of Blackwing pencils in my stocking – they are my preferred pencil for first drafting and note-taking.
3: Cigarettes. ‘There are few things that can give greater pleasure,’ says The Tatler. Not to mention lung cancer.
After that the list perks up a bit – I’d be very happy with a ‘set of gin cocktails’ or a cocktail shaker, not to mention ‘a black velveteen frock’ to wear to a dance.
However, my Christmas list is usually a list of books I want to read and haven’t got around to buying yet. Those days between Christmas and New Year, when everything shuts down and no-one knows quite what to do with themselves, are the perfect time to get cosy with a cup of tea, a tin of biscuits and a good book. So in that spirit, here’s a reminder of the Gift Guide I’ve worked on with other authors of historical fiction. Download the Christmas Gift Guide 2025 – there’s sure to be something that fits your taste.