My Journey, My Story…

My journey into a life of criminal intent was incubated during my years employed as a paralegal by a barrister to assist him with the preparation of briefs for his clients’ cases, more often than not vitriolic divorce actions and only very occasionally murder trials. Oddly enough, it is neither battling spouses nor murder trials that stand out in my memory from that time, but an unbelievably uncompromising squabble between two warring neighbours over the use of a garden hose-pipe. I witnessed a lot of injustice during those years and have used my love of writing crime fiction, and in particular my Mrs Charles Murder Mysteries, to redress the balance and, in a small way, make me feel a little better about all that I had seen.

I left Australia for England in my twenties with high hopes of becoming a published novelist, an ambition I finally achieved, but only after a long exhausting haul as a London temp who woke up each morning never knowing where she would be working that day, or worse still, if she would be working and where. Where was almost inevitably from one end of London to the other until my luck finally changed and I got a full-time job in the office of a Holborn joke and novelty shop. Interspersed with all of this excitement, was a stint as a magician’s assistant, again travelling over all parts of London, the whole of England and on the Continent.

My nomadic lifestyle came thankfully to an end when I moved to Cornwall with my husband, the magician in question. We share our lives with two delightfully loving retired racing greyhounds, Dylan and Gez, both of whom would much prefer that I spend a lot less time glued to a computer screen, writing books, and more with taking them out for long walks along the rugged North Cornwall coastal paths near our home.