New Year reflections
Thiis is the time when traditionally we look back over the year just passed and ahead to the year to come. I nearly didn’t bother this year. It has, most people would agree, been a terrible year. What is there to look back on with any pleasure? Well, at a personal...
How many words must a writer write down, before he can rest with a beer?
With Christmas and lockdowns and my promising that I'm going to spend less time blogging, I haven't really written anything here for a bit. But today I saw somebody on Twitter talking about word count and targets and it reminded me that this is such a hardy perennial...
Merry Christmas
We're just a week off the big day – or as big a day as people are going to allow themselves at the end of a quite extraordinary year. I don't want to dwell on a miserable past few months and an uncertain future. If I'm going to write a downbeat blog post, it's going...
Two historical novels reviewed
Since I started limiting myself to blogging just once a week, a lot of my posts here have been book reviews. I really don't want this to turn into a book blog, but there are a lot of good books out there and I like to help promote them. This week I finished two very...
Christmas Reads
It can't have escaped your notice that it’s December and we are very firmly in the run-up to Christmas.That means it’s the time of year when starving authors try to fill their Christmas stockings by persuading you to buy their books. So here, in case you are...
It’s that time of year again … (and a free gift)
It’s that time of year when I blog my annual reminder that books make ideal Christmas presents. Amazon has now introduced the option to send Kindle books as a gift in the UK. (This service has been available in the US for a while.) Look for the button on the right of...
The Stranger in My Bed: Take 2.
Three weeks ago I reviewed Karen King's latest, The Stranger in My Bed. While it is billed as a psychological thriller, the issues that underlie the story are important. Here Karen talks a little more about them. Thank you, Tom, for your blog post about my new...
Pink for a girl?
As I promised last month, I'm cutting back on the effort that I'm putting into blogging, which has meant book reviews on Fridays instead of separate review blogs on Tuesdays. That, combined with technical problems while I migrated my blog to a new host (some photos...
Jennifer Macaire’s latest
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know how much I enjoy. Jennifer Macaire's writing. So I'm delighted to have her here talking about her next book. A Remedy in Time Thank you for having me as a guest on your blog! I'm here to talk about my newest time...
The Stranger in my Bed
‘Coercive control’ is a form of domestic abuse that has started to be taken much more seriously over the past few years, especially since the Serious Crime Act in 2015. It’s not a new thing and there have been many stories and films featuring it over the years. In...
