House of Recovery

Present Day

A young couple buy a dilapidated house at auction to get on the property ladder. As derelict as the old, detached villa looks on the outside, the interior is like a time capsule, and other than years of silent neglect, the house has been preserved, waiting for new occupants. As renovations commence, the house begins to reveal secrets to its gruesome past and why it was abandoned nearly two hundred years ago.

1844

An undertaker and a volunteer nurse at a hospital for contagious diseases become acquainted through the victims of a murderer creating chaos within the medieval walled city of Carlisle. The unlikely couple, a hunchback and a wealthy young lady, learn about each other’s professions, realising the cloak between the living and the dead is a very thin veil. They question why fate has brought them together, yet cruelly keeps them apart.

The tangled web of past, present and future interferes in all their lives, yet all they strive for is happiness. Will fate be kind to those who do the wrong things for the right reasons?

History in 100 Chapters

Covering the period from when Earth began to the end of the Great War and designed for the general reader, this book aims to give a chronological account of life on Earth. It relates all parts of the world to each other for those whose acquaintance with history has been limited to short periods about different places and cultures.

Each of the chapters has been designed to be self-contained so that browsing by episodes of time or place will be informative and interesting. Scientific discoveries, cultural advances and religious milestones illuminate how the human race has developed through the ages.

The present state of the world, and our society (scientific, political and religious), is more easily understood when we understand how it came about; in this way, it is easier to comprehend present personal and national identity and morality.

For those whose knowledge of history is largely confined to short detailed periods such as those of the Romans or the Tudors, perhaps studied at school, then this account sets out to fill the gaps both in time and in geography and show how they relate to one another, and what was happening across the world in the same era.

Hetty

This is the story of a young woman’s dilemma in World War II. How can she and those she loves survive the problems they face?

Our story opens as Hetty prepares for Will’s return from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. She has learnt that Will has been tortured and disfigured in the camp and it was only the thought of her and his daughter, Mary, conceived on their wedding night, which kept him alive.

However, two years earlier, Hetty thought that her hasty marriage to Will had ended when she got the telegram “Missing, presumed dead!” Now he was coming home. How can she tell him about her new baby, Dorothy?

Staying with Will’s parents in Somerset, a young asthmatic teacher, David, is kind to Hetty and her young child, Mary, and they fall in love. But then there is the problem of what happened when they went blackberrying.

How on earth can these damaged people find a new way to live?

What will the outcome be?

Gunner's Island

Gunner’s Island is a post-war novel that will engage dog lovers, military veterans, history enthusiasts, and undoubtedly anyone who is all three. Set in the small town on a tiny Canadian maritime island, the story unfolds with the return of World War II pilot Linus, following a plane crash that left him irrevocably altered. Linus is grappling with PTSD and acclimation back into civilian life, when he is mysteriously befriended by Gunner, a full grown and affable Newfoundland dog.

With a wide array of detailed characters and scenes that jump between flashbacks and present life, Gunner’s Island is both a drama and comedy. It is earnest yet jocular, weighty yet wholesome, and meant to set sail the reader into the story as effortlessly as its northern ocean waves.

Grasp the Nettle

Set in a remote district of Western Australia in the 1920s, an era which outlawed suicide, an unidentified body has been found and police are treating the death as suspicious. The story presents a chance for strangers (the reader) to peruse the very private diaries of the protagonists. Intriguingly, this is like peeping through the coin slot of a piggy bank to count the wealth inside. Elsie has married Tom in an arrangement brokered by her brother. Tom’s job is delivering the Royal Mail, and it takes him away from home for weeks at a time. Vivacious, imaginative young Elsie must entertain herself in their isolated, unsophisticated bush hut. Married women were not allowed to be financially independent. Grasp the Nettle is not a fairytale ‘lived happily ever after’ romance, but a lode of accurate historical data balanced by details of underlined moral standards of life before the advent of reliable contraceptives, and acknowledgement of gender diversity. In those harsh times, things that are commonplace for us today were yet to be invented: like mobile phones, internet communications, and GPS. There were not even engineered roads through country districts in this vast nation, Australia. Grasp the Nettle poses the question: how did people cope with life’s challenges?

Grandma Ethel’s Braid

Grandma Ethel’s Braid is an epic and engaging story of culture, family, love, romance, and adventure. In Part 1, the story follows three generations of a Jewish family as they journey from oppressive Russia in the early 20^th century to freedom in America. Once in America, Ethel and her family carve out a new life. Ethel marries and has a daughter. In Part 2, Ethel, her daughter, and her granddaughter face more modern challenges well into the 21^st century. A story you won’t forget!

Good for Frightening Horses!

Having survived the Battle of Leipzig, the newly created Rocket Brigade has been split with Fin and Thomo briefly returning to England before heading back to the Duke of Wellington where they are to report on this new weapon. The new troop have to pass a series of tests and conditions before being allowed to take part in the invasion of France. Assisting partisans; discovering a wrecked ship: being isolated on the wrong side of a river with the garrison of Bayonne approaching: providing the only ordnance halfway up the hillside overlooking Toulouse, Fin and Thomo have to find a way out of the blunders created by those in command, leading them, as always, into plenty of adventures where they meet old and make new friends along the way…

George and the Briton

Mark is a young British sailor who is deployed to Antioch in Syria as part of a delegation to brief the Emperor Diocletian on the liberation of Britain from a usurper. By coincidence, he meets the Tribune Constantine who introduces him to a fellow Roman Army officer, George. Mark can write in Latin so George appoints him as his clerk.

Mark is tasked to keep an account of the operations of the ‘special forces’ unit that George commands on the front line of the Eastern Roman Empire. He also keeps his own private diary and is required to provide Constantine, who is a member of Diocletian’s personal staff, with periodic accounts of operations.

As George achieves some extraordinary results and Diocletian manages to stabilise the Roman Empire following a generation of chaos and uncertainty, a new problem arises. Diocletian’s deputy, Caesar Galerius, starts seeing Christianity as a subversive religion. This becomes a challenge for George, his family, and some members of his unit.

This is the tale of Constantine and George, told through the eyes of a young soldier’s diary.

George (The Teenage Years)

This is an introduction of George to the masses. He is the representative of a whole lost generation (lost to the government and the British public) who have recently been in the news as the revelation of who they are comes out.

George tells the story of an 11-year-old Windrush boy who arrived in England from the island of Jamaica in 1965. The story is narrated in third-person and speaks of the boy’s first experience of being in a cold country, the absence of an introduction to his new family, the difficulties he faces as a new boy in a new school, the struggles to find his place, his resistance in conforming to stereotypical expectations and his fights to maintain the self-pride and independence he learnt from his early years in Jamaica.

As George progresses through the school and struggles to assimilate, he moves from being the outsider to become a cultural educator and a facilitator of his peers and brings together the different groups within his association. However, he has difficulty reconciling his family and church life with his secular associates. Through the boy’s eyes, the narrator depicts how it was at that time for the West Indian immigrant community in London and the group of unnoticed children whom they brought from the islands, how they mixed and associated with each other, their embryonic family and the indigenous population.

From Worthy Down to Diego Suarez

From the moment when Douglas, a torpedo bomber pilot, became a double agent, he was marked for extinction by both sides. In the early years of World War II, Naval Intelligence saw him as dangerously unreliable while the GRU discovered that during the Spanish Civil War he supported POUM, anathema to Joseph Stalin who believed they were allies of Trotsky. After he had been awarded the DSC, attempts to murder him began in earnest for the third time. The hope was to kill him in action. Who would strike the first blow?

Finger of Suspicion

This novel depicts events that happened to officers from Strathclyde Police covering the periods between 1990 and 2003. The names have been changed in most circumstances to protect those involved but the detail within the stories reflect events that happened and written by me in my own words as an interpretation of what I recall.

Being a police officer during this time was rewarding and I met many lovely people whilst I worked there and still remain friends with many of them.

Policing during that era was difficult and drugs were a major scourge in the deprived areas in the north of Glasgow and many families lost loved ones through overdose or other serious drug related illnesses. The criminal gangs operated in these areas ruled by fear with many drug dealers only doing it to repay a debt.

The stories provide an insight into a behind the scenes look at how investigations are managed and the characters involved in running them. It is a sad depiction of life at the front end of policing, dealing with death and misery. More alarmingly, it will discuss the lack of support provided by senior officers towards other lower level colleagues.

The author used every power of strength and determination to set the record straight with some of the events and was helped by a few other like-minded friends. It is a story of belief in one another and colleagues involved in these incidents all looked out for one another—which didn’t always happen but I am glad we did!

Fermented Spirits

Stevie Monroe and John Beverage have been friends since childhood. They are now settled in the Gorbals, a Glasgow slum. Stevie is elated when his French wife, Camile, becomes pregnant with their one and only son. John Beverage and his wife, Caroline, already have two sons. The last thing they need is yet another mouth to feed.

It’s 1902, the working classes are suffering from extreme poverty and exploitation. Men line the docks in droves on a daily basis looking for work. Even when you have a trade, as Stevie and John do, work is extremely dangerous. Drunkenness is a perennial cause of casual cruelty. Boot-legging is rife. John sets up a family distillery for some extra cash to survive, but turns more and more towards the drink himself, dishing out back-handers to his family.

Stevie, meanwhile, lives his life as a shipbuilding sheet metal worker – a friend, a husband, a father, and a man with a deviance that has to be kept secret at all costs. Deviant sexual practices are abhorred, resulting in life imprisonment, suicide and murder. For homosexual men, especially those from the working classes, Britain is in the dark ages. Navigating this world leads Stevie to a life wrought with worry, confusion, murder and love.