Media Kit

I’ve always enjoyed solving mysteries and puzzles. My thriller, So Now Go Tell, has a mystery element, and I relished the detail and depth of plotting needed to make that work. But I also love creating quirky characters in village settings, and indulging my appetite for light humour. Put all those ingredients together, and a cosy mystery series seemed the perfect choice for me as a writer. Add an interest in sensory (and extra sensory) perception, and you have my own unique recipe.

In A Whiff of Herbal Murder, my three protagonists use all the usual methods open to amateur sleuths: questioning suspects, gathering intel and piecing together clues. But when every avenue leads to a dead end, sleuth Sophie Grammar begins following a literal scent: a sensory trail left by the murderer. And the hypersensitivity she’s always cursed becomes the sharpest tool in the team’s investigative armoury.

Absolutely. I was having lunch with some friends at a watermill café, and saw a poster there advertising a ‘clairvoyant evening.’ I’d been mulling over an idea for a cosy mystery set among a group of amdram actors (theatre being another of my hobbies!), and featuring a tea-leaf reader. But in the setting of the old mill, with that poster staring me in the face, the story started taking on a life of its own.

Edwina – Sophie’s tealeaf-reading aunt – is a combination of two women I’ve known in my life. One was a relation; the other a family friend and tasseographer, whose predictions were so often uncannily accurate. Edwina’s percipience, tactile warmth, wisdom and sheer zest for life were inspired by these two wonderful characters. Some of Sophie’s experiences are drawn from my own, and the story’s Norfolk setting is a tribute to the happy times I’ve spent there, visiting family.

In the summertime, I’m normally up between 5 and 6 am and at my desk (our dining table!) soon after. I love the quiet of those first two or three hours, and the early morning light on our beautiful garden. Almost every tree and shrub there holds a memory of buying and planting. My mind is at its clearest then, though getting up is harder as the days shorten. Sometimes I’ll work all day; on others, family life calls and I treasure those times. When I’m deep into a book or an edit, I’ll move heaven and earth to keep going – and sometimes forget to eat if my husband isn’t around!

I always hatch ideas and plot in my head first. Everything I do, including directing a play, starts that way. Then I plan on paper, using a new notebook for each novel. The story morphs as I write, but I do need a structure to guide me or I’ll zoom off to explore some fascinating side path and end up with 150,000 words instead of 80,000! For me, planning never stilts the story; it simply helps me to keep focussed.

Poisons and their effects. I’d studied herbal poisons while directing Romeo and Juliet, but needed to be sure of a few gory details, such as how quickly the poison would work; the exact symptoms the victim would experience; and – crucially! – how much of it would be needed to kill a normally healthy person. I read some detailed reports on accidental poisonings from Digitalis (Fox Gloves) which I accessed online. They were necessary to my research, but uncomfortable questions to type into a search engine!

Yes – Brian, the Watermill Players’ lighting technician. He was one of those characters who just morphed on the page as I watched him. I would never have planned a ballet-loving builder with a passion for theatre, but he was such fun to create! It’s a joy when that happens, I think.

Nyla, my third sleuth. I’d started off by making her an illustrator, but didn’t see her as having any particular extra sensory skill. Her role in the sleuthing team was to provide useful medical intel, since she is married to the local GP and helps out on the surgery reception desk. She therefore gets to hear quite a lot of gossip. But by the end of the book, I decided to give her a special skill of her own. During my studies, I’d read about colour/mood perception: people who sense mood through an aura of colour. It seems the perfect choice for Nyla’s artistic background, and something I will develop in future books.

That being different needs no excuse – and as Sophie finds, it can be a gift, rather than a curse. That message is also endorsed by Edwina and Brian.

The village name. I wanted something that reflected Norfolk’s history, and gave a sense of my setting’s small community. I’d already come up with the idea of the Watermill Players performing a rehashed Viking version of Hamlet. And as many place names in the region have Viking roots, it all fitted together well. So I searched for the Viking words for wheel (hjól) and village (býr), and Holberry Down was born.