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So, November 19th is publication day for The Other Mother, book two in my Peasedale Woods Killers series, and I am SO excited!

I read and listened to a lot of authors talk about how difficult book two is, after the high of publishing a debut novel, having to get to grips with penning another eighty odd thousand words.

Well, lovely reader, I had a BALL. I already knew what The Other Mother was going to be about, how the story was going to play out, and where my protagonist, Suzannah, was headed…...

What if you didn’t know where your teenage son was last night...

What if his body was found in a shallow grave in the woods…

What if there were twelve other bodies dug up….

What if your son WASN’T a victim…

How well do you really know your loved ones, the people you live with every day, the family you trust? Scott and Blair thought they knew their son, but they were wrong.

Becca’s review of The Other Boy sums up the feeling of my book beautifully –

Holy moly. Where to even start. I'm so torn over...

I recently received some feedback for the next book in the Peasedale Woods Killers series, book three, The Other Killer, where the beta reader said the overriding theme in the series is that mothers love their sons.

She is, absolutely, right.

I am a mother of two boys, and I have also been involved in the raising of three stepchildren, two of which are also boys. I wrote the first book in this series, The Other Boy, in response to a documentary I watched about Dean Corll, the Candyman serial...

Writing The Other Boy was a long process with a LOT of learning on route, swathes of text removed and reorganized, and characters lost. It was terrifying and thrilling. My favourite part of writing a book is, undoubtedly, the editing. Once the first draft is written, anything is possible, and there are so many wonderful surprises still to discover.

The Other Boy has been an organic, free-writing process and the twists and turns wrote themselves. There was no planning, the scenes just came...

I don’t consciously use people or places I know in my books, but it is obvious in The Other Boy that I have been inspired by the places and individuals that surround me. Most obviously is the setting of Peasedale Forest and the woods where Lily goes missing.

I am a little exercise obsessed, I walk early in the morning around the woods behind our house with our Great Dane, I run regularly, too, and I have a small home gym where I lift weights. It is the woods that features significantly in The...

The Other Boy is my first published novel and writing it has been the most wonderful rollercoaster of hard work, steep learning curves and dogged determination.

I first started writing shortly after giving birth to my first child, a baby who slept during the day and not at night. I was suffering from post-natal depression and my marriage was crumbling under the pressure. Hormone fuelled and in need of an escape, I began to write. The world was awash with Harry Potter, so my first attempt at...