Retreating from reality – Rowena House

Driving home after marking the 90-year milestone of my dad’s well-lived life which, tragically, is now sunk into the horrors of Alzheimer's, I made a sudden – but also not-so-sudden – decision to return to the beautiful southern French town of Castillon-la-Bataille on the banks of the Dordogne to reprise last year’s energizing, restful, magical writing retreat at Chez Castillion with the inimitable Jo Thomas, hosted by Janie Millman and Mickey Wilson. 

On Twitter or their website you can find more photos of their historic sandstone townhouse and the azure swimming pool in their courtyard garden. The colours are just as crisp and exotic in real life. The interiors are a mix of cooling mosaics, eclectic furniture and artworks, nothing pretentious, all homely and dreamy.

I took the decision to return to this paradise while parked up in the rain about 4 pm yesterday. We catch the ferry this evening. The course starts tomorrow. I am overwhelmed by the privilege of being able to repurpose money at the last moment to fulfil this dream, but life is precious and can be snatched away in so many different and cruel forms. In his heyday, dad would have approved of my choice.

I really hope everyone can snatch back agency and joy from time to time. I think I’m going to cry if the swifts are screaming over the pool as they were in the evenings last year. Meanwhile, here is the link to their website and also to Manda Scott’s recent Accidental Gods podcast which in part prompted the decision to escape the ocean of tears for a week.

https://www.chezcastillon.com/

https://accidentalgods.life/how-do-we-live-when-under-the-surface-of-everything-is-an-ocean-of-tears-with-douglas-rushkoff-of-team-human/

 

Rowena House Author on FB where I’m sort of journalling the C17th witchy work-in-progress

@HouseRowena on X/Twitter 

 

PS If you're a writer who wants to be published, please read Anne Rooney's piece on the economic realities we all face. I'm very aware my writing is another expression of privilege. Here's the link:

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2024/04/how-can-it-ever-work-anne-rooney.html

 

 

 

Where do I come from? (Part 1) by Lynne Benton

This month's blog was originally published in 2021, but there could be some out there who never saw it then who might enjoy reading it now.  And even if you did read it first time round, you might enjoy reading it again.  I hope so, anyway.

While wondering what to write about, I came across a thin book, almost hidden among fatter volumes on my bookshelf, called The Observer Book of Books.  Published in 2008, some of the gems inside are somewhat out of date – but others are still fascinating and totally relevant today.  Although some articles are more concerned with books for adults, this particular item is specifically about children’s books – which inspired this blog.

Where do I come from? concerns the origins of children’s fiction, and tells of the background to several famous books.  Since there are ten in all, I’ve decided to write about five this month and leave the remaining five for next month’s blog.  They are listed in chronological order – at least, in order of the year of their publication.

The first book is one everyone will have heard of and most will have read, possibly many times, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, first published in 1865. 

As most people know, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was an Oxford minister who told his original story to, and based its heroine on, his young friend Alice Liddell.  However, what is not quite so well-known is that several real people appear in the story as nonsensical characters, such as Dodgson himself as the Dodo, Disraeli as Bill the Lizard, inventor Theophilus Carter as the Mad Hatter, and artist John Ruskin as the Drawing Master.

The second book is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L Baum, published in 1900.

This was possibly intended to be more political fable than fantasy, since Baum was sympathetic to the Populists, a socialist alliance of farmers (Scarecrow) and industrial workers (Tin Man).  Both were sent down the Yellow Brick Road (the gold standard) along with the Lion (the natural world), braving the Wicked Witch of the East (Wall Street) to see the Wizard (the president), who was an ordinary man of illusory power.  Baum’s books give over the rule of Oz to the commoners, while Dorothy (folk wisdom) returns to Kansas.  Now, having read all that, I’d rather like to see the film/read the book all over again!

Next comes Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, published in 1902.

Peter sprang from several sources: JM Barrie’s brother, who died at the age of 13 and would therefore never grow up (or “remain a boy forever”), the five Llewelyn Davies boys whom Barrie befriended, and perhaps Barrie himself, who was only 5 feet tall.  Another young pal, six-year-old Margaret Henley, called Barrie “my fwendy”, and became Wendy.  The Roman god Pan gave Peter his surname and mischievous persona.

Following that comes number four: The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.

Grahame invented this tale for his son Alastair.  Blind in one eye and an only child, Alastair was prone to rages (he committed suicide at 21).  Mr Toad’s preposterous behaviour matched Alastair’s, providing a welcome but controllable disruption into the Riverbank’s orderly Edwardians.

And the fifth and final book in this selection is Winnie-the-Pooh, by A A Milne, published in 1924.

The book was modelled on Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, and his toys.  The bear was called Winnie after London Zoo’s Canadian black bear, and Pooh was the name of a swan.  Christopher Milne, who struggled with his legacy (as anyone who saw the film “Goodbye Christopher Robin” will appreciate) later recalled his mother Daphne as the one who invented stories about toy animals.

I found all this information quite fascinating, and I hope you do too.  Five more next month! 

Website: lynnebenton.com

Comfort Reading by Sheena Wilkinson

I'm one of those people -- I suspect many writers are -- for whom whether to read isn't a choice. The only choice is what to read.   I read every day, and can't think of a single day when I haven't. But of course there are times when life gets in the way, and there are only certain things you fancy. 

I remember once talking to a friend's elderly mother, who had been widowed and understandably lost her reading mojo, which bothered her. She explained that she didn't want to read anything new as she didn't think she could get into it and it might be upsetting. So why not try an old friend? I suggested, being a re-reader myself. She looked at me in disdain. Oh no, she said: she couldn't possibly read something she'd already read.

It seems contrary, but I sort of understood. Sometimes you want something familiar but not too familiar -- the latest book from a favourite and trusted writer is always ideal. Though when a lot of your favourite authors are long dead that's not so easy -- unless someone like Persephone or Dean Street Press publishes a forgotten masterpiece. 

Recently I had cause to think about this as I unexpectedly had to have a minor surgical procedure. Not having been in hospital since I was six, and never before having had a general anaesthetic, and being, moreover of a catastrophising and over-imaginative turn of mind (I'm a novelist for goodness sake!) it did not seem minor to me. I thought of Ginty in my beloved Antonia Forest books who thinks, when she is accused of making a mountain out of a molehill, Yes, that's all when it's not you it's happening to. 

I knew I would need some books to see me through. It all happened quickly so I was already in the middle of The Priory by Dorothy Whipple (the mid-century novelist who got me out of my Covid reading slump) which was ideal. But what next? I knew I would be resting and therefore needing some comfort reads for at least a week -- something for in between old episodes of Call the Midwife. (Given the nature of my indisposition it was odd that I could fancy CTM but who can fathom the contrary ways of humans.)

I had Covid last summer and had binged all my Malory Towers and St Clare's books. For reasons I shall reveal very soon on this blog, I have been in a vaguely school-storyish mood for some months.  

I thought about the Chalet School -- 59 of them, all neatly ranged in the bookcase on the landing. But I know them too well -- not only what happens, but often the actual wording of sentences. Besides, I wanted to read on kindle, so I wouldn't need my glasses and didn't need to worry about switching on the lamp if I woke up in the middle of the night.

Elizabeth Jane Howard came to my rescue (not for the first time) with her wonderful Cazalet saga, about an English family before, during and after the Second World War. I know them well enough for the characters to feel like old friends, but not so well that I remembered every detail. They are accessible but beautifully written. And Elizabeth Jane Howard is the most accomplished 'head hopper' I know. This makes her sound like a headlouse: what I mean is that she can shift point of view with incredible deftness, mid-scene, even mid-paragraph. I know I could never manage that, but I read her as a masterclass in what can be done. Because of that, and because I am writing a novel set during WW2, I also felt like I was doing a tiny bit of work at the same time. 

I'm glad to say that I'm fine now, with one book still to go! 

What are other people's comfort read go-tos?

Lilac Mood Board by Lynda Waterhouse

The lilac blooms in a patch of polluted ground. The land had been used as a battery dump during the Second World War so flagstones were laid. My neighbour first planted the lilac in a raised bed but it did not thrive so she lifted up one of the flagstones replanted it in the ground. It thrives there.

The magpies have been squabbling over the small twigs they have tugged from the lower branches to weave into their nests.

Mixing memory and desire,

Stirring dull roots with spring rain.

(T.S Eliot, The Wasteland)

The Great God Pan made his first pipe from lilac wood and whoever hears his music is changed forever.  A note of spring.

At night the heady perfume sweetens my dreams.

Even before love knows that

It is love

Lilac knows that it will blossom

(Helen Dunmore, City Lilac)

The bloom will only last three short weeks at most.

 So make the most of their display. Beware of bringing lilacs indoors lest you lure the faeries into your home. That powdery sweet smell also has the power to transport humans to fairyland. Or does their cloying smell cover up a sickness in the house? Does it evoke a Victorian deathbed? Could these warnings be merely tales told by gardeners to save the lilac?

There are perfumes containing a lilac fragrance ; Idylle by Guerlain, En Passant by Frederic Malle, White Linen by Estee Lauder and Fleurs d’Interdit by Givenchy.

Now, as the flowers are on the wane, and are stained with brown, a gang of birds have moved into the garden: a sparrow family, a straggly robin, two blackbirds, a tiny wren and a mob of blue tits. We all try and ignore the upstart parakeets.

O were my love yon lilack fair,

Wi’ purple blossoms to the spring,

And I, a bird to shelter there,

When wearied on my little wing

(Robert Burns, O were my love yon lilack fair)

 

How can it ever work? (Anne Rooney)

 There has been some debate this week (as so often) among the members of the SAS who bring you this blog about why authors earn so little, and what can be done about it. I can answer the first bit, but not the second. It has to do with how little people pay for books, and the small proportion of that little that gets to authors and illustrators. 

Imagine you have written a picture book that sells for £10 at full price. You will receive 5% of the money the publisher gets for the book, and the illustrator will also receive 5%. This is called a royalty. The publisher will very rarely get £10 for a copy of the book — only if they sell it from their own website, really. Most of the time they will get about £5 (if they are lucky) after the distributor and shop/Amazon have taken their share. So now, as author, you can claim your 5% of £5. That's 25p per copy. But wait — lots of copies will be sold at *huge* discounts and you will be lucky to get 2p a copy. No, ignore that. Let's see what you could get if everyone played fair. You get 25p. Of course, if you have an agent, you will lose 20% of that 25p, so now you have only 20p per copy.

How many 25ps do you need to live on? To make the numbers easy, let's say you want £25,000 — though that is turnover not profit and is not enough to live on. To get £25,000, you would need the publisher to sell 100,000 copies of your book. I have been writing for 25 years and have only ever written two books that have sold more than 100,000 copies. Most books sell fewer than 10,000 copies. And those sales are over its whole life, not in one year. Let's pretend your book will sell 10,000 copies over four years. That's 2,500 copies a year (though it won't be that even). You will get £625 a year. To have an inadequate turnover of £25,000, you will need 40 books earning for you, each selling 2,500 copies a year, every year. If we assume the earning lifespan of a book is four years, you need to publish (not just write — some will be rejected) 10 books a year.

(Let's pause to use better figures: 20p a copy (you have an agent) and you need a turnover of £40,000 because remember authors get no sick pay, no holiday, no employer's pension contributions [pension? what pension?] and have to pay all their own running expenses. At 20p a book, you need to sell 200,000 copies. Every year. At 10,000 copies, over four years, you will have only £500 a year. So you will need 80 books that are earning you royalties every year, publishing 20 a year.)

I've simplified this. Most books are sold for an advance against royalties, which is paid up front by the publisher, usually in three chunks. The advance has to be earned back before you get any royalties. So if you have an advance of £3000, and you are making 20p per book, the publisher will have to sell 15,000 copies before you get any extra money, above the £3000. Most books never earn out — they don't sell enough to generate any royalties. So most authors are living on advances, which at least don't take four years to get (though they can: the staged payments can be years apart). The earning-out problem is massively hindered by discounted sales. If your book is sold to a discount outfit like Book People in large numbers, you might be earning only 2p a copy (or less). It takes far more sales to earn out the advance, and as a lot of people buy the book cheaply, there are fewer readers who want it who will be paying full price.

There are a few extra chunks of money. You should earn money from library loans (PLR, Public Lending Rights) and photocopying of your books (ALCS, Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society). Let's be optimistic and say you earn £5,000 a year from these. Now you need to earn only £20,000 (or £35,000) from royalties/advances, so you only need to sell 80,000 (or 175,000) copies a year, so you only need to be publishing 8 (or 17.5) books a year. 

Of course, out of your £25,000 or £40,000 you have to pay tax, and for all your computer equipment, software licences, broadband, travel for research/meetings/conferences and any other expenses. There will be days, if not weeks, wasted while publishers don't get back to you with information you need. There will be book proposals that initially look as though they are being accepted and are then rejected further down the line. Occasionally, a publisher will go bust and never pay you. 

Could it ever work out well? Suppose you got a digital-first deal of 25% on a genre novel that might sell 100,000 copies. (But digital-first sells for £3 or so at most, and isn't an option for children's writers.) Even so, 25% of half of £300,000 is still only £37,500. A full-length novel every year, every one of them successful, and you could just about survive. Yes, self-publishing. Do you really think you can shift 100,000 copies without a marketing department? A few people can — they either got in early or they already have a name through traditional publishing (or being a celebrity). Most people can't. Most people who want to be writers want to write, not market stuff.

The average income for a professional writer is £7,000. This is why: maths.

Anne Rooney

Out now: 81 Mind-Blowing Biology Facts, 1 April 2024, Arcturus

 

Monsters and More Monsters by Paul May

I've always been happy to abandon a book after 50 pages (or less) if I'm not enjoying it.  Occasionally the first page is enough. Then, in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, I decided to read all the Carnegie winners in order, and write about the experience here. I don't think I realised how long it was going to take (maths was never my strongest subject) and here I am, starting on my fifth year of reading. 

There have been 84 winners of the Carnegie Medal so far and it was too much to hope that I would like all of them. When I haven't enjoyed a book I've found myself quite reluctant to write about it, but I'm interested in describing the experience of reading all these books as well as in saying a bit about the books themselves, and that means that occasionally I need to find ways of saying what I didn't like, or felt didn't work. And that, of course, is as much about me as about the book.  

Patrick Ness won the Carnegie twice in 2011 and 2012, both times with books that have monsters in their titles. I want to start with A Monster Calls, the 2012 winner based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd. I was curious to know just how much of that original idea made it into the book which Ness wrote, and the answer turns out to be, not very much. (I've put a link at the end of this piece to an interview that goes into detail about this). Siobhan Dowd had sketched the characters of Mum, Conor and Lily, and a talking yew tree which was to have been a grandmother figure, but which Ness made into the monster of the title. Then there was the idea of the yew tree telling three stories, though the intended  nature and content of those stories was unknown, as was the ending of the book. A Monster Calls is very definitely Patrick Ness's book.

I found this novel much more engaging and powerful than Monsters of Men, and it also throws some interesting light on the earlier winner. That's one reason I wanted to take this one first. The other reason is that this book deals with a situation I know intimately—the early death of a mother with a thirteen-year-old son. And it was perhaps because of my special interest that I found the behaviour of the adults in the story incredibly frustrating. Conor's parents and grandmother never tell him that his mother is dying, but instead collude with his belief that the treatment she is receiving is working. As a result, rage and confusion are constantly building inside him.

This is not to say that anger and confusion won't happen if you know the truth. When we found out that my wife's illness was terminal, six months before she died, we told my son that she was going to die. We didn't realize that it still hadn't properly registered in his mind. It didn't do so until an afternoon in the hospice shortly before she died, when she told us tearfully, 'I don't want to leave you.' 

So, I spent most of the book saying to myself, 'Please, just tell him!' But they never did, not in so many words. Even when Conor did find out that his mum was going to die, the words 'death' and 'dying' never got a mention. I'd add here that Conor's mum is really hardly a character at all. We know only three things about her: she loves Conor, she loves her own mother, and she is dying.

Everything that Patrick Ness does in this book is done very well, and the final scene is very moving but I can't say that I felt, in the end, completely convinced by the story. Reviewers describe it as 'low fantasy' which is I guess, realism with a bit of fantasy thrown in. In this sense it's a bit like Margaret Mahy's two Carnegie winners, The Haunting and The Changeover, or like Skellig or River Boy, but with all those books I was completely engaged and I've been trying to work out why that didn't quite happen with A Monster Calls.

Partly it's that annoyance about the way the adults behave, but it's more than that: it's that I feel I'm being required to learn something. And that happens because Conor is very definitely being required by the monster to learn something. That's where the stories come in.

The yew-tree monster is a strange, wild, fierce creature of Conor's imagination which at times seems to leave behind evidence—berries, leaves—of his real physical presence, and at others appears to be a metaphor or proxy for Conor's anger. The monster wants to free Conor by getting him to tell his own truth, and that truth (spoiler alert) turns out to be that Conor wishes it was all over, and the implication is that, deep down, Conor knows the only way it will end is with his mother's death. While he's waiting for Conor to come clean, the monster tells him stories in which characters and events turn out to be not what they seem. But Ness does this in a way that exactly mirrors, in miniature, what he has done at far greater length in Monsters of Men.

Here's the heart of it: Conor says: 

'So the good prince was a murderer and the evil queen wasn't a witch after all? Is that supposed to be the lesson of all this?'

The tree tells Conor there is no lesson. A few moments later Conor says: 'I don't understand. Who's the good guy here?'

There's not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Conor shook his head. 'That's a terrible story. And a cheat.'

It's a true story, the monster said.

As soon as characters start to have this kind of explicit conversation I start to feel uneasy. The tree may be speaking to Conor, but I can't help feeling that the author is speaking to me, and if I'm reading a novel then that is exactly the kind of thing I want to be shown, not told.

Conor's reaction to that story pretty much sums up how I felt about Monsters of Men, Ness's sci-fi epic that won the Carnegie in 2011. In Monsters of Men you can be fairly sure that if a character does something good they'll probably do something bad a few minutes later. I exaggerate slightly, but only slightly, and that makes it very hard to really like anyone. The characters all feel terribly slippery. So you'd think I'd be happy because I am being shown, at very great length, that people can be both good and bad. Well... 

By a clear 200 pages, Monsters of Men, is the longest winner of the Carnegie Medal. It is also, and by some distance, the most violent. It is the third volume of a trilogy entitled Chaos Walking. The first two volumes, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer weigh in at 474 and 517 pages respectively. I decided that I couldn't really read the final volume without reading the other two first, and for the first few hundred pages I thought I'd made a good decision. I enjoyed quite a lot of that first book, but then the book's best character—a little dog called Manchee—was killed, and shortly after that I realised I wasn't enjoying Chaos Walking any more. The same things seemed to keep happening over and over again. Violence, betrayal, violence, more violence, war, anger, rage...

Nevertheless, I persisted. I read fifty pages at a sitting and eventually I reached the end. Given the huge numbers of glowing reviews printed on the opening pages of the books, and the thousands of five-star reviews on the internet I can see that I'm in a minority. This isn't the first Carnegie winner I've had trouble finishing but it's definitely the longest.

I wonder if it's possible to detect the influence of computer games here. I remember how children I was teaching would produce incredibly long stories and I'd start to read them thinking how great it was that they'd written so much, only to discover that what they were describing was a protagonist (themselves) fighting and defeating an endless sequence of enemies. Clearly, there's a lot more than that going on in Chaos Walking, but I think that I would have reacted very differently to the trilogy if it had been about 1000 pages shorter.

This is a book about war, and it invites the reader to consider, along with its protagonists, when, and if, killing and war can be justified. It contains genocide, murder, and misogyny. It describes the enslavement and branding of aliens and women, bombings and shootings and eye-gouging. There is hardly a second of light relief, with the exception of that little dog. I think it was Erich Segal who once said 'If you want to make them cry, kill a dog,' but maybe that's an apocryphal story. I didn't cry when the dog died but he made sense as a character in a way that none of the others did to me, and I missed him when he was gone. And I have to say that when that yew-tree monster said 'there is no lesson', I think he was lying. When the kind of dilemma that haunts this book is repeated over and over, as in: 'Is it OK to kill a thousand people to save the one you love?' it can't help but feel like a lesson, in the sense that you are being asked to learn something, even if that something is that there are no right answers.

There is a whole universe of science fiction out there which is published without any kind of age categorisation and is perfectly accessible to young people without being marketed to 'young adults'. An odd thing about this book is that the two young protagonists are 13 years old, or 14 in the years of the planet they're on, which is how old you'd probably make the protagonists in a 'middle grade' book. I was always told by publishers that you want the characters to be at the upper end of the age-range because kids don't really want to read about people younger than them. I was reading recently about how many younger children will 'read-up' as the industry has it. Maybe that's what happens here.

Nothing quite like Monsters of Men had won the Carnegie before. For the precursors of this kind of dark-tinted dystopian SF I'm looking back to someone like John Christopher (All Flesh is Grass, Tripods), who, like Patrick Ness, enjoyed presenting moral dilemmas to his readers and wrote for children as well as adults. Moral dilemmas were also meat and drink to early series of Star Trek, in episodes often written by top SF writers. Before YA was a glint in the eyes of its publisher parents, Science Fiction was acting as a first stepping stone away from children's books as is brilliantly described in Francis Spufford's memoir The Child that Books Built. If I recommended Chaos Walking to a young person I'd certainly suggest that they also read Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Iain M Banks and Theodore Sturgeon, to name just a few, and there's no shortage of contemporary SF either. I  hope this book will give young readers a taste for SF that leads them to seek out those writers. 

If you have a different perspective on Chaos Walking I'd love to hear from you in the comments. This was the book that nearly torpedoed my project to read all the Carnegie winners, and I was very close indeed to giving up. Only the fact that I'm so close to the end kept me going. Luckily for me, none of the others are as long as this one.

Finally, here are a couple of links to info/discussions about how Patrick Ness came to write A Monster Calls.  Firstly, a Q and A from Publishers' Weekly from 2011 with Patrick Ness and Denise Johnstone-Burt, the editor Ness shared with Siobhan Dowd. Secondly an interview with Patrick Ness from 2016.

My own blog/webpages are here.

A HISTORY OF MYSTERY (part 2 - middle grade books). by Sharon Tregenza

                                                                A HISTORY OF MYSTERY

Selecting appropriate examples of middle grade mystery was difficult - there are hundreds of good books to choose from. In the end I just picked a random handful and went with them.

'The View from the Cherry Tree' by Willo Davis Roberts: Davis Roberts has written plenty of good mysteries but one of her early ones remains a favourite. This book is accessible for readers from Year Four upwards. It's been around since the seventies and it does feel a little dated; there's something of the lightweight mystery movie in its simplicity. Rob retreats from family turmoil to his favourite hidden seat on a large cherry tree, from where he witnesses the murder of Old Lady Calloway, the neighbourhood busybody. Most readers of this age will solve the mystery before the characters do, but they'll have fun doing it.

As a psychological thriller of sorts, 'I am the Cheese' by Robert Cormier gives the reader a lot to think about. It's the story of a boy named Adam who is on a physical journey through New England and a mental journey through the past, revisiting his traumatic childhood and trying to uncover lost memories. Sound interesting? It is. 

    'I am the Cheese' began Cormier's experimentation with first-person present tense narration. Young readers felt drawn into the story by the immediacy of Cormier's style and the book was a huge success. It was later made into a creepy movie - with a cameo by Cormier himself - in the 1980s, but it was given terrible reviews. This is no surprise as with the double narrative of the story, the three different points of view, and the fact that most of the book is made up of one character's internal monologue, it was always going to appeal more to a reader than to a viewer. This book is a real challenge and popular with more advanced readers.

'The London Eye Mystery' is by British author Siobhan Dowd. First published in 2007, it tells the story of Ted, a boy with Asperger's Syndrome, and how he solves the mystery when his cousin, Salim, apparently vanishes from inside a sealed capsule on the London Eye. It was Dowd's second children's novel and won six awards, including the School Library Journal Best books of the Year Award in 2008.

Ted and Kat watch their cousin Salim board the London Eye, but after half an hour it lands, and everyone has got off - except Salim. Where could he have gone? How on earth could he have disappeared into thin air? Ted and his older sister, Kat, become sleuthing partners since the police have no luck.

 Despite their prickly relationship, they overcome their differences to follow a trail of clues across London in a desperate bid to find their cousin. Ultimately it comes down to Ted, whose brain works in its own very unique way, to find the key to the mystery. This is an unputdownable spine-tingling thriller and will sweep up even the most resistant reader in its race against time.

sharontregenza@gmail.com

www.sharontregenza.com