Author Egan Hughes mixes a potent cocktail of past trauma and mental health issues with a young couple’s switch to rural living and our growing dependency on tech to create a fraught and unnerving suspense in Leave the Lights On. Their new ‘smart home’ is Joe’s dream. A remote cottage where everything – from the lighting to the locks –…
The locked-room murder mystery that she’s neatly stitched it into is entirely her own creation but the inspiration behind Hope Adams’ novel Dangerous Women is the Rajah quilt, an actual quilt made by convicts on their 1841 voyage of transportation from London to Van Diemen’s Land. (What we now know as Tasmania, Australia’s island state, following a name change in…
Emma Stonex takes as her inspiration for The Lamplighters a real event from 1900, where three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles Lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides. Moving the action to Cornwall in 1972 and making hers a rock lighthouse, fifteen miles off the coast from Lands End, she creates a compelling locked room mystery together…
21 January is one of our favourite days here at Nut Press because it’s Squirrel Appreciation Day, which means extra helpings of nuts for Squizzey and the squirrel crew who work so tirelessly (at least a full afternoon a week!) behind the scenes to make him and this blog look good, and the outdoor squirrels, who get a bonus feed…
Happy New Year! Yes, I know we’re well into January but, here at Nut Press, things are getting off to a gentle and relaxing start. Given how last year turned out, the squirrels are feeling skittish enough as it is and we don’t want to spook 2021 into doing anything silly. And, while I may have taken the Christmas cards…
Author of award-winning novella The Plankton Collector, Cath Barton, joins me for a #NovellaNovember Q&A to celebrate the publication of her second novella, In the Sweep of the Bay, which comes out later this month. There’s no definitive definition as such, so can you tell me what you understand a novella to be? The simple answer is that it’s a…
Tammye Huf’s debut novel A More Perfect Union is a remarkable love story—one inspired by that of her great great grandparents—between an Irish immigrant and a household slave he encounters on a Virginian plantation, and their attempt to overcome every obstacle and prejudice to be together. Henry O’Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape poverty and famine in Ireland,…
Kate Marshall dives into a new case in Shallow Sands, the second book in this exciting new series from Robert Bryndza, when an initial discovery of hers brings something altogether more disturbing to the surface. When Kate Marshall finds the bloated body of a young man floating in the Shadow Sands reservoir, the authorities label it a tragic accident. But…
A big thank you to Kath – and Squizzey – for inviting me onto the blog today to mark the publication of my fifth book, A Wedding on the Riviera. One of my trademarks as a writer is my fondness for glamorous locations. Kath suggested I might talk about the complexities of researching locations when in lockdown – so that’s…
Sally Magnusson’s The Ninth Child is a winning blend of folklore and historical fiction incorporating real people, places and engineering projects, all brought to the shores of Loch Katrine in 1856, where the boundary between our world and the land of faery is in danger of being disturbed. Loch Katrine, 1856. Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor…