Blog

In each episode in my cozy mystery series, I add new characters and settings to old favourites from previous books. In my latest novel, Artful Antics at St Bride’s, the school acquires a secretive new pupil, Frieda Ehrlich. Her school fees are sponsored by enigmatic...

Beatrix Potter was born 157 years ago today on 28 h July 1866 and lived to the age of 77 (22nd December 1943). I bet she never imagined that, 121 years after her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published commercially and eighty years after her death, her...

Meet the Three Sisters in Owen Mullen's brand new psychological thriller Three Sisters! The Sisters... Alex hadn't asked to be the older sibling but she bore the responsibilities it placed on her shoulders in true Alex style, with love, understanding and infinite...

In Love at First Site I wanted to explore the idea of putting a woman into a very male dominated working environment. My first thought was to look into trucking, but it’s a pretty lonely occupation on the whole, so the romance might have been difficult to find. I’m...

My sister was two years above me at school, and the very idea of being friends with each other’s friends was unthinkable. There was a strong ‘stay in your lane’ mentality. Friendships that crossed the year groups did exist, but they were rare, and we eyed them...

Known as the ‘Fat’, the ‘Red’, and the ‘Learn’d’ due to its rich cuisine, crimson-hued buildings, and left-wing politics, Bologna is one of my favourite Italian cities. The porticoed arcades and the historic centre with the Basilica of San Petronio and Neptune’s...

There is the saying that well behaved women rarely make history and I feel the same about my characters. Well behaved protagonists rarely make for the best stories in my opinion. The more of a difficult history, more bad choices or poor decisions and more selfish or...

Autumn and Rosie – best friends in The Start of Something Wonderful – meet face-to-face for the first time after twenty-four years of friendship. Their relationship started as penpals aged eleven after their respective English teachers set up a penpal exchange. With...

I qualified as a nurse from the Mater Hospital, Dublin. A lifetime ago. I was eighteen when I began, a naive, green-as-grass young woman whose eyes were soon opened.  Over the next three years, I was thrown into the deep end of ward nursing. Often, as second, or...