Wednesday 26 June 2013

New Edition, New Book


The Fifties Mystique sold out within less than a year of publication. (I don't know how many copies were printed.) Quartet Books decided not to reprint, so for a while the book has been unobtainable. The only copy on Amazon UK is listed at £5000, which is presumably code meaning "not available".
However, there is an E-version, and  within about a month a second, print edition, published by The Cornovia Press, will come out. So, to all the frustrated readers who have written to me asking how to get hold of the book: it's coming soon. And so is my new novel.
           Dead Woman Walking is also published by The Cornovia Press.
           By pure, unplanned coincidence, my  advance copies of Dead Woman Walking arrived here on the 75th anniversary of the House of Commons vote that permitted Jewish children to be taken from Germany to safety in the United Kingdom. Many people had volunteered to help, either by fostering  children and  giving them homes, or by escorting the children on the long train journey. This rescue of Jewish children was a generous, charitable gesture by this country, unmatched anywhere else in the world. The scheme continued until war broke out; by then, about ten thousand children had been brought out of Germany to safety.
           One of the several parallel story-lines in  Dead Woman Walking  concerns  a character who appeared  in several of my previous crime novels, Dr Fidelis Berlin. As a small child she  was brought to  England on a Kindertransport . On arrival, it was discovered that there was no identification pinned to her clothes.   Now in old age, she has belatedly decided to try to discover her true identity.
           Another strand of the book is based on  the first years of my adult, married life, when we lived in Edinburgh's New Town. I'm indebted to Martin Edwards, author of the crime-fiction blog
Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, for the suggestion that I should return to the characters in my very first novel, A Charitable End.
             Dead Woman Walking will be available in (some) shops  on August 8th.



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