Here’s what happened after I couldn’t find a copy of my own book to read, the internet decided not to exist anymore and my cat was violently ill on me. Still smiling. On the outside! click here for the live reading of Body on the Island that followed.
So incredibly excited to see a review of Body on the Island in The Arbuturian magazine. This is a seriously fabulous magazine with some gorgeous articles. I’m very honoured to have such an amazing review in there. Thank you so much.
You can see the review here but I’d urge you to look at the whole of this amazing publication too. Just wonderful!
Here’s me, looking a bit chat show host circa 1985, doing a live reading this week from Body on the Island. Hope you enjoy it! Link his here.
And if you can’t wait to hear who dies and whodunit, you can buy the book here
I’m incredibly grateful to have received this magnificent review in the Yorkshire Times. Thank you so much. That’s one to frame for the days when the plots won’t work and the characters won’t say much. Writers live for days like this so I’m going to cherish this one! Here’s the link.
And here’s the full review, which is brilliantly written by Paul Spalding-Mulcock. Thank you so much!
up her sleeve. The first is her ability to segue from farcical comedy and witty dialogue into almost poetically verdant descriptive prose: ‘There was little sleep to be had in the unearthly night. The bitter air spread through our limbs. Strange, disgruntled noises rose from the shadows and slipped across the darkness. I could hear the island’s siren voices arcing over the dunes and down towards the sea. I was hollowed by fear, the cold worming its way through my joints’.
The second ace to be played in the novel’s high stakes poker game is characterisation. Pandora, Ursula’s strident mother and the matriarchal doyen of the cohort she dominates is once again rendered with consummate skill. Saturnine and the epitome of procrustean intolerance, Pandora’s dogmatic, brassbound force leaves the pages and can be heard upbraiding the reader for the slightest misdeed they commit whilst savouring the story. Yet beneath her crustacean exterior beats the heart of a broken woman and a devoted, if over protective mother.
Whilst the delightfully deadly pantomime’s supporting cast are all drawn with aplomb, Bottlenose the boat’s captain stands out for special praise. Part alcoholic evil twin of Captain Birdseye, part Ancient Mariner sans the albatross and Christian allegory, he breathes his booze-drenched folkloric tales through the narrative with eccentric elan. His every utterance darkens the novel’s ambience lending it a benighted surrealism which hovers on the border between hysterically funny and ominously unsettling. Fittingly, Bottlenose is the novel’s atmospheric barometer only rivalled for the role by Dowd’s use of prosopopoeia to employ the island itself and the elements torturing it as an insidious force in its own right.
So, Body on the Island is a beguiling blast. I was entirely outwitted by Dowd who played me like a fiddle. I closed the book utterly satisfied, having been joyfully entertained. If you are looking for a murder mystery suffused with comedy, but dripping with maleficent intrigue, this one is likely to delight. Needless to say, there may be many things ‘Mother does not do’, but she does provide the basis for a damn fine read !
Body on the Island is published by Joffe Books
This morning I did a little live reading of Body on the Island which you can listen to here. Hope you have a lovely day. x
Here’s a reading of Body on the Island which was released two days ago! Facebook
I know a lot of you have been kind enough to listen to me reading from this every week. I started in the first lockdown and today we reach the end! It’s been a marathon but I’ve loved doing these and thank you so much to everyone who has been watching. It’s been a real highlight of the last year for me. Thank you. Have a lovely day and I hope you enjoy this last reading. xx https://fb.watch/3K1sboCBLz/
My new book has just been reviewed by this amazing reviewer. This is a real crime aficionado so I’m incredibly chuffed and love her analysis of the genre. And I love the fact that Body on the Island is ‘Standing Trial’!
This quote from her review has made my week!
‘I thought her variation of the dying message clue, was brilliantly executed in a very creative way.‘
You can see the full review here and there are lots of wonderful books on the rest of the site. Thank you so much.
Good morning! I hope you’re all safe and well. As some of you know, I’ve been doing these live readings of The Smart Woman’s Guide to Murder for a fantastic authors’ association every week since the first lockdown and it’s been so lovely and surprising to see quite a few of you have started following along.
I don’t think at the beginning I had any idea they would go on so long! We’re now coming to the end of that book and the sequel is due to be published on 23rd February. So, from the start, here is my first live reading of Body on the Island. One day I hope to do a reading in a bookshop and you’re all very welcome to come! Until then, I continue to read to my screen every Thursday morning and hope these give a little entertainment for ten minutes with a cup of coffee at the end of the week. Have a lovely day and I hope to see you at a real live reading one day. Here’s the link to the book which is available for pre-order https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08W9F5ZKC
And here’s the link to watch the reading. https://fb.watch/3AOp89ut8_/
WHICH ISLAND?
To celebrate the launch of my next book, Body on the Island which is released on 23rd February, I’m running a competition. The first to guess the island in my book will win a signed copy of book 1 and book 2.
Island’s are fascinating, with their natural isolation and that sense of abandonment. They’re also perfect elusive settings for many books. Today’s island is Mont. Saint-Michel and is the base for Angela Carter’s magnificent story The Bloody Chamber. A fabulously gothic re-imagining of a European fairy tale, this story has a murderous marquis taking his new wife to the island where the causeway floods, leaving the castle inaccessible. There are his previous dead wives in a room she should not enter; iron maidens; and a blind piano tuner. The island quickly becomes a frightening, beautiful prison. ‘That lovely, sad, sea siren of a place!’ I won’t spoil it and tell you her fate.
Sadly, this magnificent island is not the island in my book. But which is? All the clues are in the book. Good luck!
