A Scholarly Application

.

I am very pleased to let you know A Scholarly Application - the third in the Furze House Irregulars series - is now up on Amazon, ready to be delivered to your Kindle on April 18th.

This third book was something of a challenge. After A Rational Proposal and A Respectable House, I knew the world of the series well, and was comfortable with all four of my heroines. I also knew three of my heroes reasonably intimately. But I had no idea at all about Lilith's Edward. Absolutely none. He was simply a name on the page. Terrifying. It wasn't until I came across a photo of David Bowie looking endearingly scruffy, with a blond fringe falling over his eyes, that I suddenly 'saw' Ned Makepeace and knew what made him tick.

Relief all round. I do hope you enjoy the result.



A Scholarly Application:

Society bluestocking Lilith Fitzgilbert is the last person anyone would expect to create a scandal. Maverick antiquarian Edward Makepeace is the last person anyone would expect to take on a female scholar. And when Lilith joins Edward’s excavation of the Devil’s Ditch near Newmarket, neither of them expect to find a dead butler. Nor, on top of everything else, do they expect to fall in love.

A Scholarly Application is the seventh of my Newmarket Regencies and the third in the Furze House Irregulars series featuring women of spirit, women of courage, women who don't see why, in this male-dominated Regency era, they should not also play their part in bringing wrong-doers to justice.
.

Shortlisted!

.

The news is out and I am DELIGHTED to reveal "A Rational Proposal" has been shortlisted for a RoNA. The RoNAs always attract a tremendous range of excellent books. I'm so pleased that the readers liked mine enough to judge it one of the top five in its category.


"A Rational Proposal" is the first in the four-book Furze House Irregulars series set in Regency Newmarket and London and - once my head had stopped telling me I was an idiot and had adjusted to creating a series rather than a stand-alone - was great fun to write.


The RoNA awards ceremony is on 4th March. I'm looking forward to a grand evening with my RNA pals celebrating everyone's wonderful books!

The full list of shortlisted books can be found here. 

Congratulations to all of us!

.

A Respectable House is now out!

.

A Respectable House - the second in the four-book Furze House Irregulars series - is now out.

This one features Kitty Eastwick - Verity Bowman’s half-sister from A Rational Proposal - and starts immediately after the end of that book. It was quite a challenge writing the first couple of pages without cramming in a lot of ‘the story so far...’ from book one. I hope I managed it!

Kitty Eastwick is running for her life. Nicholas Dacre is guarding her. Both are scarred in different ways and must learn to trust each other before anything like a happy ending can be reached.

Once again the story stands alone as far as the love story and mystery is concerned, but woven through it is the whole-series conundrum of the ‘shadow master’ Flint.

The ‘respectable house’ (or at least discreet, as Kitty puts it) of the title refers to Furze House at the top end of Newmarket High Street (which I am convinced ought to be there even though all the maps strangely disclaim any knowledge of it). While I was busy imagining the big, echoing house and adding a laundry, stables, vegetable plot and tiny cottages to the rear, I got a little concerned that I was cramming a lot into quite a modest space.

Grosvenor Yard cottages, now demolished

Imagine my absolute joy at discovering pictorial evidence of the old Grosvenor Arms site a few alleys down!

Old site of Grosvenor Yard, Newmarket

Grosvenor Yard is now a fairly unlovely car park, but in the past there was a large inn (with a ‘jug and bottle’ for off-sales), a decent sized courtyard, an old farmhouse and - yes - two rows of tiny, terraced one-up-one-down cottages! It is moments like that which make a historical novelist's life so glorious.

We really are embedded in the past!

Photo credits of Grosvenor Yard to the Newmarket Local History Society.

The Furze House Irregulars

.

Sorry for the recent silence. I'm busy writing the fifth in my Newmarket Regency series, which I'd thought was going to be a stand-alone, but which my idiot brain suddenly had the bright idea of turning into the first of a new set of four (maybe) books set in both Newmarket and London. It was a little like walking into an inn courtyard and discovering an entire new house lurking around the corner.

As this brainstorm happened a third of the way into the writing, it necessitated a fairly lengthy and somewhat panic-struck reappraisal of what was and wasn't going into the book. Also how I would finish it off as a stand-alone, while still leaving room for the other three.

Confused? Yes, me too. Pretty sure all will be well though. Fairly pretty sure.

This book is called A Rational Proposal and will hopefully be out next month. I'm still thinking about covers, but here's a tiny snippet from the opening page.

CHAPTER ONE

Kennet End, Newmarket, October 1817
 
Miss Verity Bowman, undoubtedly by design, was looking particularly fetching, framed in the window seat of the dower house wearing a demure black mourning gown. Only the cut of the material and the subtle sheen of the satin and perhaps the double row of tiny black buttons gave away the fact that it had come from one of the more exclusive establishments on Bond Street.
    Charles Congreve, invited to sit down and be comfortable, appreciated the picture she presented, fully understood why her uncle had made her his heir, and desired nothing more than to strangle the pair of them. Sadly, there was little to be gained in strangling a man who had departed this earth just ten days since. In addition, the legal brotherhood tended to look askance at those of their members who took to throttling clients. Which, he was very much afraid, Verity was about to become.
    Unaware of his less-than-affable thoughts, Verity smiled warmly as he took a seat. “Charles, how lovely, such an age since we have seen you. Mama and I are so glad it is you dealing with this sad business, though I do hope nothing very dreadful has happened to poor Mr Tweedie?” 
    Verity had happened to poor Mr Tweedie. Charles's senior partner had taken one appalled look at the codicil appended to Admiral Harrington's will (a document that had been perfectly sound in wind and limb when it had left his own chambers), made an astringent remark about amateur notaries in Newmarket who didn’t have the wit to know better, and announced himself to be at a delicate stage with several cases, too much so to travel into Suffolk to undertake the process of winding up the late admiral's affairs. Not that there would be any, he'd added as an aside, the admiral being a very clean-living gentleman. Just the small weakness when it came to the turf. He was confident Charles would manage.
    “Thank you,” Charles had replied, feeling anything but grateful. “You have recollected Miss Bowman is my mother’s goddaughter and a particular friend of my sister?”
    Mr Tweedie had looked at him over the rim of his spectacles. “Naturally, I have remembered. A family attorney never forgets anything. Nor, as I am sure I do not need to remind you, does he allow personal considerations to influence his judgement. I repeat, I repose complete confidence in whatever decisions you might find yourself making. You had best leave directly after the funeral.”
    So now Charles murmured his partner’s excuses about having a great deal of urgent work, was pressed to take tea and macaroons by mother and daughter, and his portmanteau was carried up to a guest bedroom just as if he was an invited visitor and not a common attorney. And all he could think of was how far Verity’s intelligent brown eyes were going to widen when he broke the terms of Admiral Harrington’s will to her. And then how far they would narrow. And how he had rarely, if ever, managed to get the upper hand of her in all their dealings together.