Books and Biscuits

I’m finding January a little draining. I don’t feel especially full of ideas, and I’m trying to let that be okay. I keep thinking we’re pressured to treat January like a 'new chapter,' but sometimes it’s just a continuation of tiredness  only with colder weather and higher expectations. For now I’m focusing on small comforts and steadier rhythms, rather than goals. If you’re feeling like this too, you’re not alone.

 

I would like to share a brief glimpse of what lies ahead in my current mystery cycle, which will ultimately be brought together as a five-book box set. The Leiston Riddle – coming by summer ’26. This novel continues my interest in communities shaped as much by what they withhold as by what they reveal. It will be a story rooted in place, memory, and the unsettling persistence of unanswered questions hopefully fitting reading for a season traditionally associated with renewal and reckoning. The Middleton Mystery – completing the five book box set The Middleton Mystery  will round out the cycle and complete the five-book box set. This concluding story is intended to draw together the thematic and narrative strands that have been quietly accumulating across the series – offering resolution without neatness, and answers that arrive with their own costs. Taken together, these books form a loose but deliberate arc: stories connected by place, by moral pressure, and by the slow ...

It’s strange what stays with you. Not the noise but the faces – the way the air felt afterwards, brittle and off key. ‘They have taken my phone!’ she gasped. And sure enough two youngsters scampered off, booty in hand, leaping from the bus and into the crowd. For a moment I sat there wondering if I should offer her a banana – the only thing I had to hand – before realising it had gone soft and slightly rotten in the day’s heat. It was an absurd, although somehow easier to manage than the look on her face. She had two children with her, both wide-eyed and yet she was the first to recover ‘It’s alright,’ she said briskly ‘It was my work phone – I have another.’ The words were too tidy somehow, rehearsed even. For a moment I wondered if the whole thing was real, or some small performance staged for the inevitable audience – the kind of trick that only makes sense to an insurance firm. There was a touch of theatre about it all – as if she had played the scene before. Somewhere out in gangl...

  Legends, saints as well as forgotten communities who shape the land abound in The Iken Icon. Their presence lingers like ghostly whispers... The soil, the water and the ruins reveal fragments of the past like clues left by an unreliable narrator, thus commences the journey I am taking with the Iken Icon. The sequel,  The Iken Icon , is beginning to take shape. I’m not ready to reveal too much yet – the story will decide what it wants to be told – but I can say this: Iken itself will be more than a backdrop. With its ancient church and its long memory, the land feels like a character waiting to speak and something I haven’t really tried to do as I am an urban writer at heart. This is only the beginning of the journey. As the writing unfolds, I’ll share more here – about the challenges, the surprises, and what I discover as I progress.

A good clue might seem minor or unrelated at first, but later, when the twist is revealed, it becomes  obviously significant . Example : A dog that didn’t bark during a break-in later reveals the intruder was someone known to it. The best clues aren’t hidden, they’re right there,   buried among distractions  or filtered through character assumptions. T echnique : Use red herrings or multiple interpretations to mask the true meaning. The clue should emerge naturally from character behaviour or choices and not be dropped in arbitrarily. Example : A suspect unconsciously straightening a crooked picture frame may link them to a ransacked room later. Make clues reflect the larger emotional truth or moral question of the story. Example : A discarded child’s toy at the crime scene isn’t just a clue, it hints at the victim’s broken home life. No clue should exist in isolation. It should tie into at least one other clue, forming a web that readers can eventually untangle. What Fee...

Recently someone recommended  'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine'. When it came out a good friend suggested it and most likely I will now make time to read it. Another book that came up via FB caught my eye which is 'The Language of Blooming Things'. I even put an Oprah Winfrey pick in my eBay shopping basket - at a bargain price - 'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong. Most of these are hidden gems I think - possibly not the first - I think it was quite well received at the time and a lot of people know about it. The image is of Anna Sewell's house - or maybe it is somewhere she stayed in Great Yarmouth - I am quite fond of Great Yarmouth - it is fairly maligned but still has a lot to recommend it - easy to find your way around, lots of charming old houses in varying states of delapidation, completely unpretentious - 'bouji' is not a thing there in case you were wondering.