Two new non-fiction books are now on the market, published by Luscious Books. They are essentially the same book, but one is a UK edition and the other a US edition. The news items differ.

I REMEMBER THAT differs from other memory journals. It is aimed at those older people who need just a little help to bring their memories back into sharper focus. It does this by using news items as ‘memory triggers’: it briefly describes a variety of news events that have occurred between 1945 and 2000. It then prompts the reader to recall what was happening in his/her own life at that time. This book is available as UK and US versions, both in standard and large print.

To find out more go to:

http://www.lusciousbooks.co.uk/i-remember-that.html

Yesterday I began a journey through my published novels, a journey that will take you up to my latest thriller published by Darkstroke. This latest one is called The Girl From The Killing Streets.

I explained that writing this latest novel demanded every skill I had learned in my career as a writer. I doubt if I could have written it sooner. It was Highly Commended in the 2019 Yeovil Literary Prize competition.

This account of my writing career, isn’t written in chronological sequence.  I am grouping my books for convenience. I told you yesterday about my three aviation novels. I have written other books along the route towards Killing Streets. I was born in Cornwall, but half my life has been spent in the beautiful county of Dorset. My Hampton Warlock Trilogy tells the stories of three different families who live in a fictitious Dorset village which I call, not surprisingly, Hampton Warlock. The name is adapted from the real village of Witchampton. Keen-eyed lovers of Dorset will recognise the descriptions of the location as coming from the real village of Worth Matravers. When the original publisher went bust, these books were quickly taken on by Cloudberry and republished under different titles.

The Long Road to Sunrise (Republished as The Legacy of Shame)

The Hadleigh family of Hampton Warlock learn about a child lost in the Amazon rainforest.

King’s Priory (Republished as The Legacy of Secrets)

Colin Portesham searches for secrets hidden in King’s Priory, his parents’ home in Hampton Warlock. He discovers what happened to his grandfather, a WW2 fighter pilot.

The Gallows on Warlock Hill (Republished as The Legacy of Conflict)

Rose Greenwood unearths family secrets going back to the civil war. Her discoveries reveal conflicts in Dorset and Ireland.

The Girl From The Killing Streets is my new thriller from Darkstroke. It is a truly dark read, one that demands a painful journey of discovery for the key characters. Writing it demanded everything I had learned from my personal history as a novelist.

I have been writing seriously for the past twenty years. An insight into me, the writer, may help to know my books. I’ll begin with my trilogy of aviation thrillers.

If you want to write about aviation, you need to know about aviation. My working life was spent as an air traffic controller. I had an insight into the workings of aviation at airfields and at air traffic control centres. I worked at numerous locations around the UK and was the Belfast aerodrome controller on duty the day troops were airlifted into Northern Ireland in August 1969. In the late 1970s I was an area controller at the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre in Prestwick. I wrote most of my books with a degree of inside knowledge.

PRESTWICK

Four hundred frightened passengers

Two badly crippled aircraft

And nowhere to land

HEATHROW

Thousands of passengers

Hundreds of aircraft

One plan to end it all

DEAD RECKONING

Three unarmed aircraft

One dangerous mission

And no hope of return

An Amazon reviewer wrote about Prestwick: “I read every aviation related book that I can get my hands on and this one I can safely say had me totally hooked. Excellent piece of work and the degree of technical accuracy could come only from a professional.”