Tag Archives: Carol Thomas

Location, Location, Location with Rosie Travers!

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Today, I am pleased to welcome first-time visitor Rosie Travers to my blog. Rosie and I are both members of the Southern Chapter of the RNA, but it has been a while since we have caught up, and so I am delighted that Rosie has stopped by to talk about the location of her latest novel, Trouble on the Tide.

The Isle of Wight is England’s largest island. Just twenty-three miles across from east to west, this diamond-shaped little gem is just two miles from the mainland at its closest point. Most people probably associate the island with the annual music festival or the sailing regatta of Cowes Week, but growing up just across the Solent in Southampton, visits to the island are embedded in my childhood and teenage memories; picnics on the vast sandy beach at Ryde, losing my pocket money in amusement arcades, stays at Hi-de-Hi style holiday camps…

Perhaps because it was “always there”, I took the island for granted.  It wasn’t until we returned to the UK in 2017 after a ten-year absence that I began to appreciate this treasure on our doorstep. Resettling back into our native Hampshire, we set out to explore our local area with the same vigour we’d adopted when living abroad. When you move somewhere new, especially overseas, you tick off a whole host of historical monuments and natural wonders. I realised we’d never been to Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s holiday home, so we took a trip over to the island, had a fantastic day out, and became smitten.

Osborne House

Several day trips later, we were on a blustery winter walk along the deserted esplanade at Shanklin when the idea for a story hit me. It was only a vague idea, but when I combined it with another half-baked plot already brewing, I realised I had the potential to create a whole series of cosy mysteries set on the island. My sassy ex-pro-golfer amateur sleuth Eliza Kane was born. The series is meant to be fun and entertaining and just a little eclectic – a bit like the island it’s set on. Injury has forced Eliza to take early retirement, so she takes up the challenge of solving crimes. Each book is set in a different location on the island so readers can have a virtual tour – and there’s a lot to see.

Local mainlanders always used to joke that visiting the island meant turning your watch back 40 years, but that’s most definitely changed.  In 2021 I walked the entire 70 miles of the coastal path and saw the island from a totally new perspective. While Ryde and Sandown still retain that old-fashioned kiss-me-quick ambience and Ventnor has a shabby-but-chic Victorian charm, picturesque Steephill Cove has become hip and trendy with the youngsters.

Steephill Cove

The bijou former fishing village of Seaview is now much sought after amongst second-home owners, while neighbouring Priory Bay, with its white sand beach reminiscent of the Caribbean, is only accessible by sea or on foot at low tide.

Priory Bay

From bustling Cowes to the saltmarshes at Newtown Creek and onwards to the stunning chalk and sandstone cliffs and lush rolling downs of the south coast, this is an island that really does have something for everyone – and bag loads of inspiration for a writer!

St Catherines Lighthouse

The third book in my Eliza Kane series will be published on June 27.

Thank you for sharing your passion for the Isle of Wight. I love the look of your cosy crime series, Rosie, and I look forward to reading them. I wish you every success with Trouble on the Tide! xx
About the book:

When Isle of Wight restaurant owner Stewie Beech is found dead in a dinghy abandoned in picturesque Newtown Creek, the police conclude he died of a heart attack. But just days before his death Stewie discovered he’d been the victim of a serious case of art fraud, and his grieving widow Pilar is convinced the two events are related.

Forty years ago Stewie Beech and Eliza Kane’s dad Ian were best friends. When Ian returns to the Island after a thirty-year absence to attend Stewie’s funeral, he promises Pilar he will seek out the swindlers who conned her husband and bring them to justice.

A freak accident lands Ian on Eliza’s doorstep and she is roped in to help out. Ex pro golfer Eliza isn’t used to having family around and father and daughter soon clash, and not just with their conflicting theories about the mysterious circumstances leading up to Stewie’s death. Eliza is committed to promoting her golfing for girls initiative and has a love-life to sort out. She wants to solve the case and send her dad swiftly back to his native Yorkshire. But with few clues to go, Ian Kane is in no rush to go home, and it soon becomes clear he harbours secrets of his own…

Purchase here.
 About the author:

Rosie Travers grew up in Southampton on the south coast of England. She loved escaping into a good book at a very early age and after landing her dream Saturday job as a teenager in WH Smith, she scribbled several stories and novels, none of which she was ever brave enough to show anyone. After many years juggling motherhood and a variety of jobs in local government, Rosie’s big break came after she moved to Southern California when her husband took an overseas work assignment. With too much time on her hands, she started a blog about ex-pat life which rekindled her teenage desire to become a writer. On her return to the UK she took a creative writing course and the rest, as they say is history.

Trouble on the Tide is Rosie’s fifth novel and the third in a series of fun cosy mysteries set on the Isle of Wight featuring professional golfer turned amateur sleuth Eliza Kane.

Discover more and connect with Rosie here: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Amazon | RNA

Location, Location, Location with Jan Baynham!

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Today, I am joined by fellow Choc Lit author Jan Baynham. I love Jan’s novels and the locations her stories take me to, so I am delighted to hear there is another coming soon. In this post, Jan reveals the setting of her forthcoming novel and shares her wonderful research; over to you, Jan…

My novels are all partly set in rural mid-Wales, the area where I was born and brought up, and partly in a contrasting location. Creating a sense of place and an authentic world for my characters to live in is one of the aspects of writing I enjoy. As well as visiting beautiful Radnorshire in my latest novel, readers are transported to the Mediterranean island of Sicily with its stunning scenery, magnificent ecclesiastical buildings, fascinating history and, of course, its wonderful weather. It’s where my character, Carlo, an Italian POW who is interned in a camp in the heart of the Welsh countryside, is from. He’s left behind a secret, and after his death, his daughter travels to Sicily to find out why her father could never return. I’ve tried to capture what it was like for Claudia visiting the island for the first time.

Last summer, my first visit to Sicily proved an excellent way of experiencing what it was like for Claudia. The city of Porto Montebello is fictional but based on the real places I visited, with the presence of Mount Etna in the background. As Claudia walks to find the pensione where she’ll be staying, she’s struck by the city’s straight streets and their tall buildings with shuttered windows and balconies so different from her home village.

The area has stunning architecture and churches everywhere you look. In the novel, Claudia has enrolled on an art history course so I made sure I visited the beautiful duomos in Catania, Taormina and Ortigia where I found examples of the type of paintings she’d be studying.

In the early part of the novel in WW2, Carlo’s mother shelters from the bombing in tunnels under the duomo. A highlight of my research was to visit one such shelter and try to experience how she must have felt night after night. The tour guide, Roberto, was excellent in giving so much information about what life was like down there for the inhabitants of Ortigia.

Another tour I booked in advance was a visit to Casa Cuseni in Taormina. The villa was built at the beginning of the twentieth century by Englishman, Robert Kitson and became an international artistic centre hosting celebrities from the world of literature and painting. This stunning villa is the inspiration when I imagined Casa Cristina in my book. The garden was full of symbolism in its design and the sea views from the villa were amazing.

No visit to Sicily would be complete without a boat trip. After the underground tour of the tunnels, I ended my day with a trip around the island of Ortigia. Our boat man pointed out places of interest, the heart-shaped cave and took us to admire the stalactites, stalagmites and corals in another. This experience inspired how Claudia feels when taken on boat trips.

I hope that being on location in Sicily will have made the setting more real for readers. Visiting the places that Claudia does, eating the same foods and enjoying the hot sunshine as she did all came back to me as I wrote those scenes.

About the book:

With the working title of A Tale of Two Sisters, my fourth novel is due to be published by Choc Lit, an imprint of Joffe Books, in July.

Set in rural mid-Wales and Sicily in different eras, the novel deals with secrets, forbidden love, sibling relationships and forgiveness. There’s an immediate attraction between young widow Sara Lewis, and Carlo Rosso, an Italian POW, even though fraternisation between the POWs and local women is forbidden. At the camp, former artist, Carlo, is tasked with leading a team of prisoners to create a chapel in a disused Nissen hut using scrap and found materials. He busies himself with that intending to forget about Sara. Can he succeed? Prisoners are given more freedom in September 1943 when Italy capitulates and is no longer an enemy of the Allies, but a relationship between Sara and Carlo is still not allowed. After the war, when it’s eventually safe to leave Wales, Carlo stays on as he’s harbouring a secret that means that he cannot return to Sicily. After his death in 1968 and finding letters he’d kept from his mother, Claudia travels to the city where he grew up to find out why. She is shocked by what she finds out but discovers that Carlo has been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Can she succeed in clearing his name? Who does she get to help her?

This sounds like another great read, Jan. I wish you every success with it and look forward to it landing on my Kindle in July. xx

All of Jan’s novels are available on Amazon. Click here to find out more.

Her Nanny’s Secret is also available at all good bookshops.

About the author:

Fascinated by family secrets and ‘skeletons lurking in cupboards’, Jan Baynham’s dual narrative, dual timeline novels explore how decisions and actions made by family members from one generation impact on the lives of the next.

Setting and a sense of place plays an important part in all of Jan’s stories, and as well as her native mid-Wales, there is always a journey to a contrasting location from the heart of Wales, where my characters are always from.

Originally from mid-Wales, Jan lives in Cardiff with her husband.

Find out more about Jan Baynham and her novels here: Website/Blog | Twitter | Facebook |

Location, Location, Location with Eva Glyn.

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Having read and reviewed The Collaborator’s Daughter recently, I am delighted to welcome author, and writing friend, Eva Glyn to my blog as she talks about Dubrovnik, the stunning location of her book. Over to you, Eva …

One of the early reviews for The Collaborator’s Daughter said it was a homage to Dubrovnik and its people, and I thought, ‘job done’. Well, obviously not the book’s only job, but a pretty important one to me.

Writing as Eva Glyn, I am contracted to write books set in Croatia, so location is vitally important. It’s becoming what readers expect when they pick up my book, a virtual trip to that part of the Mediterranean, with its beautiful scenery, fascinating history and warm and welcoming people.

Although I flirted with Dubrovnik in The Olive Grove, The Collaborator’s Daughter is my first book set in the city’s old town, although it will not be the last. For me, there is no finer place to be, with its terracotta roofscape enclosed within medieval walls that rise up and down with the rhythm of the rocks they stand on. Outside, the sea glistens pure azure, and inside, it is so compact it feels like a village.

Of course, in high season particularly, it’s jam-packed with tourists. Not only groups from cruise ships and Game of Thrones fans (it was one of the iconic filming locations) but day-trippers from local resorts and seaside hotels and people staying in the old town itself.

The best advice is to go early or late in the season or early in the day. When I was researching The Collaborator’s Daughter last year, we had to visit in July, but even so, walking the city walls (one of the must-do attractions) at eight in the morning, it was relatively quiet. And I needed to go there because it’s where my main character Fran heads to do some of her thinking as she tries to work out what best to do with her life.

Cat on the city wall.

Another iconic place Fran visits – or rather, is taken by local widower Jadran, is Gradska Kavana for coffee. The terrace is in the centre of some of the major tourist attractions; the Sponza Palace, the Rector’s Palace, Sveti Vlaho (Saint Blaise) church, the bell tower and the famous statue of Orlando. It’s a marvellous place to people-watch and drink a delicious cappuccino. A little pricey for Dubrovnik maybe, but cheaper than most of the UK coffee chains and so much better.

Gradska Kavana terrace.

The Sponza Palace is another location that’s key to The Collaborator’s Daughter. In the 1944 storyline, it is where Fran’s father, Branko, works for the city’s fascist mayor, to use his words in the book, the place the web of evil spins out from. For all that, it is an incredibly beautiful building with a much longer happy history, and inside hides the Memorial Room to the Dubrovnik Defenders, a heart-breaking homage to the men who lost their lives in the Homeland War of the 1990s.

Sponza Palace.

But here I am, beginning to sound like a tourist guide again. I just can’t help it. With somewhere so warm, friendly, and beautiful, I am compelled to keep going back. And to keep writing about it.

Thank you so much for the lovely post and sharing your wonderful pictures, Eva. I greatly enjoyed The Collaborator’s Daughter and wish you every success with it. xx

About the book:

In 1944 in war-torn Dubrovnik, Branko Milisic holds his newborn daughter Safranka and wishes her a better future. But while the Nazis are finally retreating, the arrival of the partisans brings new dangers for Branko, his wife Dragica and their baby…

As an older sister to two half-siblings, Fran has always known she has to fit in. But now, at sixty-five years old and finally free of caring responsibilities, for the first time in her life, Fran is facing questions about who she is and where she comes from.

All Fran knows about her real father is that he was a hero and her mother had to flee Dubrovnik after the war. But when she travels to the city of her birth to uncover the truth, she is devastated to discover her father was executed by the partisans in 1944, accused of being a collaborator. But the past isn’t always what it seems… And neither is the future.

Purchase and discover more here. | See my review here.

About the author:

Eva Glyn writes escapist relationship-driven fiction with a kernel of truth at its heart. She loves to travel and finds inspiration in beautiful places and the stories they hide.

Her last holiday before lockdown was a trip to Croatia, and the country’s haunting histories and gorgeous scenery have proved fertile ground, driven by her friendship with a tour guide she met there. His wartime story provided the inspiration for The Olive Grove, and his help in creating a realistic portrayal of Croatian life has proved invaluable. Her second and third novels set in the country are dual timelines looking back to World War 2, An Island of Secrets and The Collaborator’s Daughter. Eva Glyn is published by One More Chapter, a division of Harper Collins.

Eva lives in Cornwall, although she considers herself Welsh, and has been lucky enough to have been married to the love of her life for more than twenty-five years. She also writes as Jane Cable.

Discover more about Eva Glyn: Website | Facbook | Instagram | Twitter | Newsletter sign up

And, while blogging, I have exciting news to share. All of my romance novels are now available on Kindle Unlimited; enjoy!

Location, Location, Location with Angela Petch.

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It is always a pleasure to have my lovely writing friend Angela Petch as a guest on my blog, so I couldn’t resist inviting her along to talk about the setting of her latest novel, The Girl Who Escaped. Over to you, Angela …

All my novels, bar one, are set in Italy. I love this beautiful country and am fortunate to live in eastern Tuscany for six months each summer. The setting is very important in all my stories and the way my characters interact with their locations is a way of delving into their personalities and anchoring them to a backdrop. “Everybody has to be somewhere,” said Spike Milligan.

I think it’s better to drop details in little by little rather than describing at length: as if the reader is noticing aspects of the setting from the corner of his or her eye.

Panorama of Urbino.

My latest book, The Girl who Escaped, is set mainly in Urbino, a compact Renaissance city in Le Marche region. I know it quite well because my Italian mother-in-law is from Urbino and I married in a tiny hamlet just outside the city.

Revisiting the hamlet of Castel Cavallino, where we married. 

Nevertheless, I still felt the need to walk about with my notebook and camera to record details.

Writing beneath the twin towers of Urbino’s palace.

The young heroine in my new book is Jewish and about to be sent away from her beloved birthplace to a camp. She has already suffered under Mussolini’s racial laws and denied her university place to study medicine. How to describe the places she will miss?

This is an excerpt from Chapter Six, when Devora is struggling to look after her twin brothers on her own, as her parents have been sent to an internment camp. Their children were born in Italy and so are exempt – at this moment – from being sent away, not being deemed “foreign Jews”.

“She was alone up at the Fortezza, the wind keener than in the city centre, cold air nipping at her cheeks. The clouds over the mountains were heavy with more snow, not unusual in the spring, and she swung her arms back and forth across her chest to warm her body. And then she threw her head back and screamed, howling at the sky like a wild animal, no longer able to contain her anger and frustration. On the rise opposite, the twin towers that had always seemed to her like an illustration from a book of fairy tales now looked menacing: portals to Hell, holding bands of evil, fascist warriors bent on destroying the hopes and dreams of her family: first her father’s livelihood, next her brothers’ schooling, her own medical studies and social life all snatched away simply because they were considered different and undesirable. ‘Idioti, all of you,’ she screamed over and over, her words snatched by the cold breeze.”

While my husband’s grandparents were alive, we stayed with them in Urbino but last year, we rented a small apartment in the old quarter and I spent hours tramping about the city to soak in the atmosphere.  We met the caretaker of the synagogue and she invited us back to her home and she shared more information about the war with us, which made its way into the book.

Me in her library. She is also a writer and was full of useful information.

If a writer can manage to visit the places they write about, it helps so much when painting the scenes. Visiting a location can help bring alive the imagination.

About The Girl Who Escaped:

Italy, 1940. The girl sobs and rages as her father tells her the terrible news. “Italy is entering the war alongside Germany. Jews are to be arrested and sent to camps. We have to be ready.”

As fascists march across the cobbled piazzas and past the towered buildings of her beloved home city, twenty-year-old Devora’s worst fears come true. Along with her Jewish parents and twin little brothers they are torn away from everything they love and sent to an internment camp huddled in the mountains. Her father promises this war will not last long…

When they are offered a miraculous chance of escape by her childhood friend Luigi, who risks everything to smuggle vital information into the camp, the family clambers under barbed wire and races for the border. But Devora is forced to make a devastating choice between saving a stranger’s life and joining her parents. As shots fire in the moonless night, the family is separated.

Haunted by the question of whether they are dead or alive, all Devora can do for their future is throw herself into helping Luigi in the Italian resistenza in the fight for liberty. But posing as a maid for a German commander to gather secret intelligence, Devora is sure she sees her friend one night, in a Nazi uniform…

Is Devora in more danger than ever? And will her family ever be reunited – or will the war tear them apart?

An absolutely devastating but ultimately uplifting historical novel about how love and hope can get us through the darkest times. Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Rhys Bowen and Soraya M. Lane.

Purchase here.

Thank you so much for the wonderful insight, Angela. The Girl Who Escaped is my current read and I am greatly enjoying it. xxx

Discover more about Angela Petch’s novels: The Tuscan House | The Postcard From Italy |  A Tuscan Memory |The Tuscan Girl | The Tuscan Secret |

And, while not based in Italy, don’t forget Angela’s wonderful charity novel, Mavis and Dot. All proceeds from this novel go to vital research into Cancer.

About the author:

Published by Bookouture, Angela Petch is an award-winning writer of fiction – and the occasional poem.

Every summer, she moves to Tuscany for six months, where she and her husband own a renovated watermill which they let out. When not exploring their unspoilt corner of the Apennines, she disappears to her writing desk at the top of a converted stable. In her Italian handbag or hiking rucksack, she always makes sure to store a notebook and pen to jot down ideas.

The winter months are spent in Sussex, where most of her family live. When Angela’s not helping out with grandchildren, she catches up with writer friends.

Angela’s gripping WWII, Tuscan novels are published by Bookouture. While her novel, Mavis and Dot, was self-published and tells of the frolics and foibles of two best friends who live by the seaside. Angela also writes short stories published in Prima and People’s Friend.

You can discover more about Angela Petch and her writing here: Facebook | Twitter | website | Amazon | Apricot Plots

#WritingWednesday with Sally Jenkins: Emotional Baggage Drop.

Writing & Reading, Writing Wednesday, , , , , , , , ,
I am delighted to offer a warm publication week welcome to Sally Jenkins as she discusses emotional baggage and the benefits of letting it go. Over to you, Sally …

Emotional baggage – we all carry it, don’t we? I’m talking about the fall-out from the bad things that happen in everyone’s lives, things like relationship breakups, bereavement, redundancy and family problems. With that emotional baggage often comes physical baggage, too, such as the engagement ring that we didn’t throw back at him in the heat of the moment because why should he have it back when he’s hurt us so badly? Or maybe it’s our old workplace name badge and lanyard that used to make us feel confident and part of a team before we lost our job. Now, when we look at these objects our sense of loss and being cast aside is heightened. Our mental health suffers.

We know we should bin these objects and move on with our lives. But it’s not easy to discard something that still holds a trace of happy memories – even if those memories have mostly been soured. Emotional baggage causes stress, depression, and anger. It weighs us down and allows our past experiences to undermine our chances for a better future.

There is a solution:

The Museum of Broken Relationships.

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb accepts and displays such emotionally-charged objects along with their stories. Donating to the museum is not as final as throwing something away but it puts the object out of reach, thus preparing the ground for a fresh, confident new start in life.

Ten years ago, I read an article about the Museum of Broken Relationships and it became the inspiration for a series of short stories, which in turn became the novel, Little Museum of Hope. In the story, Vanessa is knocked for six by divorce and redundancy and is looking for a way forward in life. She hears about the Zagreb museum and opens her own version of it in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter in England. She names it the Little Museum of Hope and within the museum she creates the Café of the Mended Heart, which provides comfort food for those feeling emotionally fragile. Vanessa offers donors the chance to offload their stories as well as their objects and, as they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.

But the museum has only ten months to start turning a profit and Vanessa is faced with another challenge when her ex-husband, who still owns half of the marital home, reappears. Plus, her terrible baking means that she is losing money buying-in cakes for the café.

Donors to both the real-life Museum of Broken Relationships and the fictional Little Museum of Hope make the decision to stop letting their emotional baggage rule their lives. They recognise the need to stop dwelling on what might have been and focus on positivity for the future. I hope all the readers of Little Museum of Hope will take inspiration from the stories of the museum donors, cast aside their own emotional (and physical) baggage and move towards a future full of hope, positivity and love.

About Little Museum of Hope

A jar of festival mud, a photo album of family memories, a child’s teddy bear, a book of bell ringing methods, an old cassette tape, a pair of slippers …

These are the items that fill the exhibit shelves in Vanessa Jones’ museum. At first glance, they appear to have nothing in common, but that’s before you find out the stories behind them …

Because Vanessa’s Little Museum of Hope is no ordinary museum – its aim is to help people heal by donating items associated with shattered lives and failed relationships and in doing so, find a way to move on, perhaps even start again.

The museum soon becomes a sanctuary for the broken hearts in Vanessa’s city, and she’s always on hand to offer a cup of tea, a slice of cake and a listening ear.

But could the bringer of Hope need a little help moving on herself?

Discover more and purchase here: Amazon

About the author:

Sally Jenkins lives in the West Midlands of England. When not writing, she feeds her addiction to words by working part-time in her local library, running two reading groups and giving talks about her writing. Sally can also be found walking, church bell ringing and enjoying shavasana in her yoga class.

Discover more about Sally Jenkins and her work here: Website and Blog  | Twitter| Instagram |  Facebook | Newsletter

Thank you for stopping by, Sally. Little Museum of Hope sounds wonderful and I look forward to reading it. Enjoy the rest of your publication celebrations. xx