Fairlights!

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My new book - FAIRLIGHTS - is up on Amazon.

This is my Mary Stewart book. I first discovered romantic suspense in her pages, as indeed did everyone else at the time, and I fell in love with her power of description from the first sentence. FAIRLIGHTS is dedicated to her, for the many happy hours she has given me.

FAIRLIGHTS is set on the west Cumbrian coast. It's full of stormy seas, family friction, an old house and a gorgeous, enigmatic hero. And a heroine who doesn't realise she has a problem until it dawns on her that she is missing a chunk of memory.

It's a short novel - 32Kwords - but fully formed. And it has the most gorgeous cover from the very talented Jane Dixon Smith.

[FAIRLIGHTS was first published in a very much abridged form in Woman's Weekly in 2012. It has been so lovely to flesh it out to the size it was always meant to be.]
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Penny gets her Just Desserts

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Accent Press have now published the second in my series of Penny Plain mystery novellas.

It is called Just Desserts and features Penny (of course), Leo (equally of course), ice cream, a WI show, a missing 1950s test aircraft, odd bits of rivalry, a secret lab, a daughter behaving oddly...

I think it might be best if you just bought it.

Links to Amazon.com

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My Kindle books are on Amazon.com - and indeed Amazon-dot-everywhere - so I thought I would try finding them and posting the links here.

Deep breath. Here goes:

Penny Plain 1: The Jigsaw Puzzle - An old jigsaw puzzle leads to a new phase in Penny's life

Written on the Wind: Mystery novella with Celtic trees set on the North Yorks Moors

Fortunate Wager: Secrets and subterfuge on the Regency racecourse

There, hopefully clicking on the links will take you there. For the UK links, just click on the sidebar!
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Penny Plain comes to Accent Press!

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I am delighted to announce that my Penny Plain Mystery novellas have found a home with Accent Press.

These are the expanded versions of the People's Friend serials, but all in one place on your Kindle, without the need to wait for a week between chapters to see what happens next.

The first of the four stories is out now. It is called The Jigsaw Puzzle and is sparked off by the discovery of a strange jigsaw puzzle in Penny's late mother's cupboard.

The cover of the e-book has been taken from part of the real jigsaw puzzle that I really found when clearing out my own late mother's cupboard.

(The rest of the real story is far more mundane than the story I invented for Penny!)
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Penny Plain - the final episiode

The final part of Penny Plain for Christmas is out this week, featuring a heroic charge through the snow, a nativity with provisos, a real baby birth in a church and a happy-ever-after. Now how could anyone resist that?

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Happy Christmas reading!
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Penny Plain 4 - part three

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Part Three of Penny Plain: The Christmas Present is in the current issue of People's Friend. Items are still going missing, the mystery of the WW2 wedding photo deepens - and Leo's son arrives to spend Christmas in Salthaven.

Only a couple of days until the final episode is out!
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Penny Plain 4 - part 2

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Sorry - blogging late again. You only have a couple of days to buy Part 2 of Penny & Leo's Christmas serial before the new issue comes out on Wednesday.

Go on, you know you want to. It's not often that you find boats, petty theft, Nativities and car boot sales all appearing in the same story.
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Penny Plain for Christmas!

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The fourth Penny Plain serial starts this week in People's Friend and - as the illustration below shows - it is a Christmassy one!

You need to be quick, though, as Part two will be out on Wednesday/Thursday!
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Written on the Wind is live!

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It's finally here. The longer version of Written on the Wind is up on Kindle.

It is set on the North Yorks moors,

it contains a mysterious gardener and an ancient grove of trees

and mobiles

and gingerbread

Enjoy!
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Coming soon...

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I have been reminded today that I haven't posted anything new for a while, so I'm sharing my brand-new cover for an expanded version of Written on the Wind.

The cover is by the very talented Jane Dixon-Smith. I really love it.

This was originally a Woman's Weekly serial, but I'm going to be publishing it as a mystery novella on Kindle very soon. Watch this space.
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Low Tide

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It's a slow, sleepy bank holiday today, so here is a slow, sleepy poem. Enjoy...

  

Low Tide by Jan Jones

River flats, mud flats,
Curving haze-shimmer all along the horizon
Slender silver loops of creek
Otherworld solitary
Impassable

Boats leaning on the river banks
Making slow, crazy-angled love,
mattress half on bunk, half up wall
distant trees feathering the hatch space
endless sky through dangle-curtained windows.

Late afternoon eddy of water
pushing in from the sea
covering the shining mud
sliding the world inexorably upright
returning us to civilisation

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Penny's back!

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The first part of the third Penny Plain serial starts this week in People's Friend magazine. In this mystery, we are introduced to Penny's son Noel, whose girlfriend Caitlin is having trouble with graffiti at her family brewery.

Various characters from previous serials make an appearance, along with a few new ones.

Hope you enjoy!
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(People's Friend issue dated June 22nd 2013)

On being a jobbing writer

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It isn't easy being a writer. Not my sort of writer, anyway. Without contracts or security, but still with an aching need to write, to entertain, to tell stories that readers want to read.

On with the motley by Jan Jones

Doing makework
Hopping from project to project
My whole life spent in the remaindered aisle
eyes darting from shelf to shelf for the
bargain-of-the-moment

Motley, always motley

A scrap of beauty here
A half-elegant phrase there
Buried in the rush for a temporary high
I long for a year’s space
To cloak myself in a world of my own fashioning
To explore leisurely
Spending a day finding just the right word
Knowing my characters down to the base of the iceberg
Security

But the car needs petrol
The children need MP3 players
So it’s on with the motley and smile
And pare the ease of sleep to the bone.

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Visiting with Cupid

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Yes, yes, I know. I'm hardly here, and then I go off visiting. Today I am over at Holly Hepburn's blog putting in my order for Cupid's arrow. Although having read her splendid book, Cupidity, I'm a little worried about him having time for me...
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I Was A Rat!

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Wow, that was an experience! I'm just back from watching an adaptation of Philip Pullman's I Was A Rat at the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds - and I'm worn out! The cast were extraordinarily good - all of them playing multiple parts with impeccable timing and zero time to change.

The boy Roger - played by Fox Jackson-Keen who I wasn't in the least surprised to learn once played Billy Elliot - was fabulous. He had me aching with laughter one minute and all scrunched up ready to cry the next. I think the whole theatre breathed a sigh of relief when things came good for him at the end.

The colours, the lighting, the energy, the masks, the sheer cleverness - it was a fast-paced kaleidoscope of a production with some pertinant messages about society - and very well worth seeing indeed.

(But if you aren't keen on circuses - especially clown faces - you might want to choose that scene to nip out for a comfort break. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

I'm now drinking tea and returning to the real world. And reflecting.

[The show is on until Saturday 20th April, then off on its travels around the country. www.iwasarat.co.uk ]
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