Mystery and murder

I mentioned yesterday that I have decided that I ought to promote my books more. I write about them here on my blog and when I’m in the process of writing them – but it’s mainly about the actual writing. I write about them when they are published – but it’s usually just an extended blurb, and I mention them from time to time but just in passing. Maybe I need to do more than just mention them!

Yesterday I wrote about the first novel I self-published, ‘Farholm’, an imagined island seven miles from the mainland. Two accidental deaths which may not be quite as accidental as they seem, a young woman who went missing after getting off the ferry to the island, and two people who want to find the truth about separate events which almost ruined their lives.

The second book I published is the only one I have written which is set in a real location, a Pennine town I lived in for many happy years, Oldham. Despite ‘Flipside’ starting with a ‘love at first sight’ moment, and despite it being about the unexpected relationship Jaz finds herself in, it is actually a mystery about the brutal murders of women who seem to have been attacked and butchered at random. I created an imaginary couple of mills (factories) pubs and streets, but everything else in the setting is as it was in the town in the 1990’s. Fortunately when I was in Oldham, there was not a sadistic serial killer on the loose, but in ‘Flipside’ there is – and it seems there is a link to the new man in Jaz’s life.

Jaz has moved from Bristol to be with her recently widowed brother; she is a teacher and she has moved from a high-flying head of faculty post in a top school to take a lowly temporary position in a challenging school in the north of England. She is up to the challenge, but she does not expect to find her life is in danger from a man who has already butchered three women; she has met the love of her life, but is he, could he possibly be, the murderer? She discovers some brutal truths about her beloved brother, he seems on the verge of a breakdown, convinced there is a conspiracy surrounding his wife’s death… but where does he go on Fridays, and what does he do? “I was alone, utterly alone. I thought I’d been brave running away from my life in Bristol, my friends and familiar places; I was pleased to be so daring and impetuous, and so certain of my love for David when our eyes had met in the Lees Spa Hotel. But I hadn’t taken him home and made love to him in order to enter a violent world of fear and hate and danger.”

If you like mystery and murder stories, then I really hope you will enjoy ‘Flipside’ here are links to get your copy: