Happy New Year everyone.
Hope you enjoyed the Festive Season and have now recovered fully from the feasting and enforced sloth. Not sure I have yet but there’s a manuscript squatting on my desk waiting to be rewritten. It’s the fourth draft but I’m still not happy with it. My office is looking extremely tidy (which is unusual and somewhat disconcerting) because my cousin and his partner came to stay so I was forced to clear out all the accumulated rubbish (and scraps of paper with notes on – eg victim was already dead at 4pm so can’t have been seen in pub at 5pm or how does suspect go from being goodie two shoes pain in the neck to femme fatale two pages later with no explanation? – my first few drafts are always a dreadful mess!!!) so they could actually see the spare bed. However, in spite of this strange, unnatural neatness I’m sure I’ve already managed to get some work started.
Christmas was good apart from a serious turkey malfunction (the less said the better but the day was saved by a large ham!) and a Christmas morning visit from The Anti-Santa. On Christmas morning I noticed my car door was ajar. Someone had broken in and searched the car thoroughly (which must have disappointed him because the most valuable thing I keep in there is a rusty half-used can of de-icer). I can only assume he thought there might be presents in the boot (hence the title of The Anti-Santa). My husband (being a bit of a technical wizard) had installed CCTV so we trawled through it and eventually found the culprit – a middle aged man in work clothes who used an electronic device to open the door at 5am on Christmas morning. There was no damage to the car and nothing taken but, being good citizens we captured some clear images of the thief from the footage and sent them to the police by email (just for their information in case there was a pattern of thefts from cars in the area). However, the police didn’t seem particularly interested – so much for using our initiative to ‘help the police with their inquiries’. As someone who writes crime novels for a living I found this sadly disappointing and I resolved that Wesley and Gerry would never be so ungrateful (after all, in one of my books there would almost certainly be a murder in the next street and the thief would be either a suspect or a vital witness – probably later found brutally murdered himself of course). Once a crime writer, always a crime writer!
So what does 2017 have in store? Well, I already have a few talks and conferences booked (see my events page) and Wesley’s 21st case THE MERMAID’S SCREAM is out in hardback in early February. Also A HIGH MORTALITY OF DOVES will be out in paperback in May. I’m delighted that it’s been so well received and now I need to get my publisher’s go ahead to continue with the intended trilogy. Fingers crossed.
Once again let me wish you all a Happy New Year. I do hope 2017 will be a good year for all of us.