quotes from reviews

" A hilarious first novel"

(Yorkshire Evening Post)

" A crackpot cocktail  of unseemly goings-on  .... delightfully daft"

(Manchester Evening News)

"This is a delightfully gentle and attractive story, with Ophelia O. and her zany family   very much stars in this first novel by a young writer."

(I can't remember where this came from - but thanks!)

Ophelia O. and the Mortgage Bandits

My first novel, a comic fantasy set in an imaginary Yorkshire market town called Rambleton (variously and erroneously identified by reviewers as Harrogate, Malton, Helmsley etc.) featuring Ophelia O., a solicitor and mother of five who doesn't so much juggle her career and family as fling them all in the liquidizer, give a quick prayer, and reach for the whisky.   

The book began life as a kind of  rage-management technique while I was training to be a solicitor - "what this incredibly intransigent and completely unreasonable client really needs is a quick bop on the nose, but given the Law Society's dim view of violent retribution and on the principle that La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid,  I'll content myself with a vow of one day putting him (or her, infuriating clientism being a gender-neutral occupation) into a novel."   By the time I came to write the thing down, the memories had been softened by pregnancy and a cherubic new red-haired baby and the former clients coalesced and transmuted into characters that by then were, thank heavens, completely fictional.  

It was enormous fun to write, with the auburn cherub quietly dribbling down my back, and despite not being gloomy enough for the dark underworld of TV (though I'm still out here, chaps), I am reliably informed (from the nice PLR people in Stockton) that it is still trotting in and out of libraries on a regular basis.   

an extract from the book:

Meanwhile Deputy District Judge Ranger had completed his morning of court appointments, and was trotting jauntily down Kirkgate towards the Market Square.  With his Stetson set well back from his face and his briefcase flapping against his leg like a loosened saddlebag, he arched his neck to feel the crisp autumn breeze against his leathery cheeks.

"Steady, girl," he whispered as his imaginary mare whinnied and pawed the pavement.  "Soon be back at the corral."

Available now from Crystal Bard Books, signed by the author. 

   Ophelia O. and the Antenatal Mysteries

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