The Roo Speaks

The old storyteller tells how he met a speaking kangaroo, and how this kangaroo and its friends showed him and the young people with him the magical world the kangaroos live in, where the visitors saw how the kangaroos built their homes in the trees and caves. They learnt how the kangaroos are able to weave cane baskets as well as many other things made out of cane. They were shown the kangaroos’ magical silkworms that give silk of many different colours: this the kangaroos use to make fabrics. There were also ‘tree roos’ who fly through the trees like magic, and another group of renegade and bloodthirsty kangaroos hell-bent on killing peaceful kangaroos and taking over and then killing all humans. The visitors also learnt of a threat to the magical rain forest by logging companies. The old storyteller tells of magical ceremonies and the tales the kangaroos tell of their past. The old man and the young people must help the kangaroos save their forest and battle against the bloodthirsty kangaroos.

The Rose Garden

The Rose Garden is a story of Man,
his greed and his broken world,
his sleepwalking to a disaster of his own making.
This is a story of Man,
it tells why things reached to the catastrophic point,
and warns of his unprecedented end.
This is a story of Man,
whose time is running out.
This is a story of Man,
his survival or extinction on the Planet Earth.
This is a story of Man,
it advises him to open eyes wide and save the World for his children’s sake.

The Rule of Optimism

In the Autumn of 1991, a group of young social work students meet at university in Cardiff, each filled with positivity and ambition. With a backdrop of widespread sexual abuse in Cleveland, Rochdale and Orkney, public perception of social workers is deeply cynical and the profession is already defined by negative media reporting. But this does not dampen their spirits.

Tara is a headstrong pragmatist, a single mother raised in the South Wales Valleys and of Irish lineage. Proud and fiercely independent, she approaches life without fear, bolstered by a secure and loving relationship with her family. Alison is a beautiful but fragile young woman, a gifted musician who is haunted by her parents’ toxic and destructive relationship. As a means of escape, Alison moves to live with her beloved Aunt Clem in rural West Wales and finds an unexpected purpose to her life. Neither Tara nor Alison have ever enjoyed an enduring female friendship before. But when their paths cross, a special bond is formed. Over the course of twenty-five years, the lives of Tara and Alison become cruelly enmeshed by events beyond their control. Despite their devotion to one another, nothing can prevent the terrible unravelling that is about to take place.

The Runaway Basilisk

Family, love, courage. The Runaway Basilisk answers all the unanswered questions from the Basilisks, in a heated romance. 

Hayley runs away from New York City to find a new life in London leaving the Basilisks behind, but being away from her chosen family, everything is harder than she expects. Hayley Cohen is a girl who never wanted anything but to be invisible until it happens, and she craves nothing but acceptance. Her life is flipped upside down from having the bloodline of a Basilisk, but she is determined to live the life she was born to have.

Archie falls in love with an American, making him do the chasing for the first time in his life. From a ‘friend date’ to finding the girl of his dreams, fighting through lie after lie and surviving hidden truths about Hayley’s life, he puts everything on the line to make sure she is safe.

The Runaways

Andrew Munroe gets declared bankrupt after his building business in Leeds West Yorkshire suddenly collapses. Andy is diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression. He abandons his wife and daughter hoping to kick-start his life finding work down in London. He feels that he has let his family down badly and assures himself that they would be far better off without him. After hitching a lift that takes him down to the South East Coast, Andy meets up with a kind and caring pair of star-struck elderly lovers, one of whom owns a boarding house in Basildon.

Two other main characters in the book enter the story intermittently. The first is a girl named Gita from Birmingham, who is running away from an arranged marriage. As her story unfolds she too will eventually end up living down on the South East Coast.

The other is Sam, a loveable rogue born and bred in the East End of London. After serving an eight-year prison sentence in one of Her Majesty’s Correctional Facilities for manslaughter, he too shuns his place of birth and makes his way towards the South East Coast.

All three will eventually meet up but not in the circumstances that you may expect or predict.

The Russian Galatea

On July 16, 1918, Nicholas Romanov, the last Tsar of Russia, and his entire family were supposedly murdered by Russian Bolsheviks in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, Siberia. One year later, Alexander Kolchak, the Supreme Commander of the White Army, appointed a legal investigator to prove, beyond any doubt, that all members of the Romanov family had indeed been executed. The investigator’s name was Nicholas Sokolov.

The Russian Galatea is a story based on Sokolov’s investigation. It takes place in Siberia, 1919 – with the Russian Revolution as its background. The major thesis is fiction but woven around true historical facts. It is a detective story about one courageous investigator’s obsession with finding out what really happened to Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family. It is also a story about Sokolov’s deep relationship with the girl in a faded photograph. Is she alive or dead?

The Sash and the Crucifix

Lance-Corporal Edward Vickers, was born on the 12^th July 1900, in the Tigers Bay area of Belfast, under the shadow of Harland and Wolff Shipyard. Edward and his four friends watched some of the greatest ships ever to be built, as they towered over their streets. These five friends made a playground out of the shipyard and got to play on the decks of the greatest ship ever built, The Titanic. As they got older, WW1 shattered their lives like countless others. What they had to endure was hard to comprehend, but this first hand story had to be told. Not only was his story about WW1, but WW2 as well, where he had to fight his way through Belgium and France yet again, to get to the Dunkirk beaches.

Through his life he had some unforgettable ups, but they were overshadowed by unthinkable downs.

Edwards’s story is a remarkable one; of life through the wars, abroad and at home, and it’s a story that spans 105 years of his remarkable life.

The Satin Moth

This novel is a powerful, grim, historical fantasy story, based around the slave trade of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and its repercussions on a family whose wealth is built on it. The first part of the story introduces the present-day 10^th Lord of Eastlyn, Robert Montague, and his family, who continue to endure the consequences of a voodoo hex placed upon them centuries before. The second part describes the 1^st Lord of Eastlyn, George Montague, a wealthy but cruel and callous slave trader, and the enslavement of an Amazonian warrior named Nabila. Much of the novel’s strength is rooted in its foregrounding, which depicts man’s inhumanity to man and the vile and heinous nature of slavery. The final part shows the effect the curse has had on the Montague family and describes the actions and courage of young cousins who set out to free themselves from the voodoo hex placed upon them. The twists and turns that take place as a result are comprehensive and will provide entertaining relief for the reader following this tale of human suffering and vindication.

The Scales of Justice

Nobody on her college staircase seemed able to understand how Rowan came to be in the Intensive Care Ward following an overdose, nor could Rowan.  She could remember nothing leading up to her admission.  Over the next few weeks, as first one, and then another of her college acquaintances was murdered, Rowan began to vaguely recall some of the events, but there was always a block to fully remembering what happened on that fateful afternoon and evening.

Detective Inspector Jerry Gregory and his team investigating the murders linked them to a drug dealing syndicate based around Cambridge and London, and to the back story of one of the murder victims.

The Secret of a Seminarian

Sergio was born into a traditional Christian family in the ’80s. His mother, a devout Catholic, was always his protection; she always loved and protected him, and his father was the man he always wanted to become in the future and his inspiration. However, as he grew older, his mother began to see something different in him, and this became more evident as he passed puberty; she saw his sadness and his way of being, and felt more ashamed of her own son. Little by little, the love that his mother had for him was changing; Sergio noticed his mother was more distant and the sweet words of affection that she had said before turned into frightened looks. All the while his father harassed him more and more, reaching the point of several times attacking him in the heat of emotion. In the hope of being able to change him, his family decided to take him to a seminary so that any demon he had inside him could be removed, but when he arrived at the seminary, Sergio found two very different men who completely change his life and his vision of seeing the world.

The Secrets of Kensington Place

London – 1860

Isabella de Claire, Ward of Lord Thomas Braxton, is an orphan of no means, no family and no social standing. 

Tired of the theatrics of London, Isabella yearns to explore the world outside the confines of the social season. Her dreams of exploration come true when she receives a surprise letter postmarked Bombay. Torn between loyalty and the comfort of the only family she has ever known, her heart and the promise of new beginnings, she must make a decision that will alter the course of not only her life but those around her.

The Seminar Murders

This story opens with a murder: a prominent criminologist at a provincial university is found dead, with his head beaten in. Neither his academic colleagues nor his students liked the victim it seems, and the police investigating the crime are confronted at the outset with too many motives and too many suspects. Then the professor of the criminology department is found with her throat cut. Apart from being colleagues, did this pair have anything else in common? Who hated them both enough to kill them? Who else is at risk? Is there a malign presence stalking the calm corridors of academe, and can the police move quickly enough to prevent further deaths? In a fast-paced narrative, persuasive in its realistic depiction of both university life and a police murder investigation, the reader is immersed in the events and is present at the interviews of suspects. Using multiple strands of narration, the author takes us on a forensic path into the mind of a clever and ruthless killer.