Newsletters
This blog post is definitely one for fellow writers, although if readers want to drop in a comment I'd be interested in what they have to say. I've now published twelve books with a thirteenth due quite soon. Most of these are historical novels. That's six Napoleonic...
2022 Book Reviews
In last week’s blog post I mentioned that my most popular posts were often book reviews. I actually tried to write fewer book reviews last year because I didn't expect them to be particularly well read. Here are the books I reviewed with links to the original blog...
2022 blog posts
I published over eighty blog posts last year, which is probably rather too many. It does look as if people are reading them though. I'm not sure I entirely trust WordPress’s statistics but they claim that that has been a big growth in hits on my website recently,...
Happy New Year
How's 2023 working out for you? I'm very gently easing myself back into writing. A fellow writer has just been boasting of sitting down to start a new book and bashing out 2,000 words "just like that". That is so not happening here. I'm always happy to admit that I am...
Looking back at 2022
So here we are at the end of 2022.It’s been a funny old year, hasn’t it? A sort of good news: bad news kind of a year. Russia invaded Ukraine, but the war hasn’t gone nuclear. A small, self-selected group of not-terribly-bright people elected the most shockingly...
The Twelve Days of Christmas.
I'm delighted to welcome Carol McGrath back to my blog with her post on Medieval Christmases. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before the Reformation of the 1530s Christmas Eve, the last day of Advent, would have been a day of...
Journal of the Covid Years: Christmas special
This is the story of the Christmas that wasn’t and how miserable people were. It covers the time when there were regular parties in Downing Street. Since then, apologists for the party-goers have suggested that their behaviour was not different from what everyone else was doing. It’s possible that, two years on, we will see more re-writing of history. Time, I think, to remind ourselves what really happened.
Books for Christmas
It's that time of year when I (like an awful lot of other authors) remind you what excellent Christmas gifts books make. At a time when people are complaining that it's become quite difficult to buy stocking filler gifts for under £10, it's still the case that most...
The Night Man: Jørn Lier Horst
This review includes some minor spoilers. The Night Man is the fourth of Horst’s Norwegian thrillers I’ve read. All feature William Wisting. He’s introduced with a first name now, which is barely mentioned in the previous books. We’ve recognised him in the past as a...
Something New for Something Wicked
Want to hear me reading the opening of ‘Something Wicked’? You’ve come to the right place.