Festive greetings to you all! I’d like you to meet Archie, a Jack Russell terrier from my new novel The Family Shadow. Archie has been busy making a snowman but he’s also been helping Fiona Foley solve a Victorian mystery and dig up long-buried family secrets.

2020 has been an unforgettable year for all of us. As Charles Dickens says: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.” (A Tale of Two Cities) Imagine looking at the newspaper headlines we are bombarded with now and turning back the clock one year. We simply would not have believed what we are going through.

But 2020 wasn’t all bad. I am lucky to live in the country and have animals and a garden. I have to tell you that our normally unruly garden here has never looked so tidy. Even the lawns have neat edges now! And I’ve had plenty of time to write without distractions.

I’ve lived with my characters from A Family Shadow all year, laughed and suffered with them and now it’s time to bid them farewell because the novel is due to be published in February 2021.

I’m turning the clock back not just one year but 130… to Ireland and the sweeping Wexford coast in the early 1890s:

 A Victorian era murder. A modern-day family researcher. Can she solve the century old puzzle of a racehorse trainer’s death and his wife’s disappearance?

Ireland, 1891. Rosalind Thornton only wants to be a perfect mother and spouse. Happy at first to have given her husband the son he longed for, she begins to worry about his increasingly erratic spending and volatile moods. And when his body turns up in the local woods, her guilt remains in question for 130 years…

2021. Fiona Foley needs to put her husband’s betrayal behind her. Offered a chance to get away and recover, the disillusioned history teacher travels to the sweeping Wexford coast to assist an eccentric descendant of the Thornton family. Fending off a prying journalist intent on digging up dirt, Fiona finds herself in a race to uncover the truth.

As the two women separately untangle a devastating plot, only an old journal full of riddles might be the key to solving the crime.

Can Fiona figure out what really happened on the fateful night Rosalind disappeared forever?

Of course Fiona has Archie to help her so she’s not alone. She also has eccentric Aunt Daphne and a young man who is restoring a Victorian summer house. Though she wonders about that young man. Is he as helpful as he seems? Perhaps he also has a secret to hide.

I’ll introduce you to more characters next month and, in the meantime, have a safe and enjoyable festive season.

Many thanks for your support and kind words in 2020.

Wishing you all the best for the New Year.

Suzanne x