The Taste of Ash – A psychological suspense novel
What is it like to be a victim? How do you move on from losing everything? How do you cope when someone is watching your every move and you have no idea who it is – or what they are going to do next?
When Zoë Graham’s flat burns down in an arson attack she loses everything. But the man in the flat downstairs comes off much worse and a murder investigation is launched. Who started the fire and why? And who was the intended victim? Soon Zoë has reason to wonder if it was her. Feeling like a refugee, all she wants is to get back to some sort of normality and move on with her life – but someone is determined that isn’t going to happen.
An unknown stalker sends Zoë’s life spiralling out of control and she doesn’t know which way to turn, or who she can trust.
“Really gripping psychological drama; I genuinely couldn’t put it down. The characters felt very normal to me – not always something accomplished in a suspense novel, where the characters can often be formulaic. I loved that they were ordinary people with typical lives who reacted to events like any one of us might…”
“Crime just ain’t my genre, but I’ve made two exceptions recently: ‘The Taste of Ash’ and ‘Gone Girl’. I’ve come to the conclusion, based on these two excellent novels, that psychological crime novels can be both satisfying and thought provoking…”
Writers Diary & Journal
2019 Diary especially for writers.
10 x 7″ diary.
Writing can be a lonely business and researching relevant subjects to write about time-consuming. The aim in creating this diary is to produce a tool that is both useful on a practical level and inspirational for writers at all stages of their writing experience, with informative articles, alerts of special dates to write about and fun writing prompts each week.
There is a saying in business, ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.’ So at the beginning and end of each month we have included pages for you to jot down your monthly writing goals and achievements.
Larger than the Myslexia diary that has now stopped this diary is a great work book size.20
Welcome to my website
Thank you for stopping by, whatever your reasons. I hope you find the information on the following pages useful.
Let me tell you a bit about myself
I’ve always enjoyed getting lost in a book and read widely from across the genres. I don’t have a particular type of book. I think my choices are quite eclectic – from the classics to sci-fi, adventure to crime, historical to contemporary. The only common factor of my ‘favourites’ is that they are all utterly engaging stories with strong and interesting characters.
As a child, my sister and I were encouraged to write reports on what we had done each day on holiday. These were usually notebooks filled with postcards, cut outs from leaflets and brief information about the places we had visited. I enjoyed doing them and later at school won prizes for my project work. It was hardly surprising then that I went on to follow a career in graphic design, getting into art college early at the age of sixteen for four years of typography, advertising and general design.
Why I started writing
I always enjoyed English at school but going straight to art college meant I didn’t get the chance to do A-levels. However in my mid 20s I went to evening classes and did a language and literature combined course – and that was the start of my love of creative writing. After the course I joined a creative writing class. One term in entered a short story writing competition with one of the major national writing magazines. To my surprise, I won first prize and that proved to me that I had some talent. The creative writing course I was on was very gentle in it’s critiques so I joined Havant Writers’ Circle. I also felt short story writing wasn’t enough and set about starting a novel. It was a steep, long learning curve.
Psychological thrillers/psychological suspense
The genre for my books is psychological suspense. As a child I thoroughly enjoyed books such as Enid Blyton’s Adventure series, where the children had to work out what was going on and get themselves out of danger. Perhaps this is the root of my decision to write in the genre I do. I like to explore how ordinary people cope when they are thrown into extraordinary situations, when crime infringes on someone’s life and where, through no fault of their own, a character is forced to confront situations they have no idea how to deal with.
For some of the crime books I recently read and reviewed click here.
In the News
Article in Chichester News
Article in Star & Crescent
Blog post on Alli
On Radio Solent
Piece to Camera for That’s Solent TV
Thinking of Self-Publishing?
Through my business The Art of Communication I can help you create the cover you always dreamed of, that is appropriate to your genre and looks amazing. I can layout the text pages of your book and upload to your chosen indie publishing platform so that everything runs smoothly.
I can also help you establish your indie-publishing author brand and author platform with promotional items such as postcards or bookmarks and set up an editable wordpress website or blog and headings banners for social media sites. Costs are affordable so if you want to take back control of your book and publish something that looks professional give me a call on 01489 481906 or visit
