Home Thoughts Weekly

Waking up to leaden skies and yet more rain driving against the window, I was very interested to hear an item on Radio 4’s Today programme about the potential for ‘Welsh Noir’. Hinterland, a new detective drama currently being filmed in and around Aberystwyth, has been bought by DR Denmark, the Danish company behind The Killing. The weather here is certainly bleak and grey enough at times to make me feel as if I’m living in a Danish drama, but what’s made me a huge fan of Scandinavian dramas like The Killing and The Bridge is the quality of the writing. The second series of Borgen, the political drama, has, for me, been outstanding and I particularly like being allowed to work the story out for myself instead of being spoon-fed.
So, will ‘Welsh Noir’ become the next big thing? Well, Ed Thomas, the producer of Hinterland, put his finger on the essence of wide appeal when he stressed that authentic stories also had to be universal; or, to use a familiar catchphrase, it’s about local s…

Apologies for being a bit elusive, but I'm trying very hard at the moment to crack on with Book Three.  It's therefore a bit rich of me to ask anyone else for their time, however, here's the latest book news for Move Over Darling for anyone who might be interested.

I'm a guest blogger at RomCon, home of the Annual Romance Readers Convention, today.
The large print of edition of Move Over Darling is out now, as is the audiobook, read by Charlotte Strevens who has a lovely warm voice and took immense trouble to get in touch with me before making the recording so she could be sure to get the accents right. You can hear a sample here.

2012 was memorable both professionally and privately; a photo shoot for a national campaign, appearances in national press, a new book and a new son-in-law...



But over Christmas and the New Year, everyone around us seemed to be struck down with illness or, in Ma’s case, by her iron falling off a high shelf on to her back (really, can this woman never tire of finding new and inventive ways of injuring herself?). And on the last day of the old year, there was news of a little death when our distraught next-door neighbour came to the door to ask our help in retrieving the poor worn-out body of the shy stray cat she had fed for three years from her garden. Tom and I always called it The Invisible Cat because it was so wary of human contact, but as we stood over it with our torches in the rain, we were both moved to see that the poor thing had tried, and just failed, to make it back to a place of safety, a basket in our neighbour’s greenhouse.


I felt a little apprehensive as the new year b…