02 Saturday Aug 2025
Once upon a time, when I first joined the Historical Novel Society, I’d avidly read the quarterly Historical Novel Review, dreaming that one day my own books would be reviewed there, and perhaps there would even be a feature about my work… Continue reading
12 Friday Jul 2024
Posted in Books
Tags
book-review, Books, Elizabethan, espionage, fiction, Historical fiction, murder mystery, Stafford Plot, The Tom Walsingham Mysteries, writing
Tom Walsingham is back! Book Five of his adventures, A Snare of Deceit, is out today with Sapere Books. 
It’s New Year’s Day, and Queen Elizabeth’s court is celebrating: a banquet, dancing, music, a troupe of tumblers… Not that the atmosphere is especially cheerful, what with the Queen in a bleak mood over the fate of her troublesome cousin, Mary Stuart, hanging in the balance.
Someone else is not enjoying the festivities: Tom is in attendance, waiting for something to happen – something he had a hand in preparing; something that should tip the scales… So, when one of the tumblers is found dead in the stables courtyard, apparently fallen from a window, it should be none of Tom’s business…
Except, this particular tumbler was essential to the plan Tom had set in motion for his kinsman and master Sir Francis Walsingham – who is already on the Queen’s bad side these days, and can’t afford to have his secret manoeuvres exposed.
Add in a greedy moneylender, rival fencing-masters, and a reckless poet… can Tom solve the murder and save the day for Sir Francis, without ending dead himself – or in gaol?
Find out by reading… A Snare of Deceit!
21 Sunday Jan 2024
Tags
Babington Plot, historical mystery, historical novel, Sapere Books, The Tom Walsingham Mysteries, Tom Walsingham
Oh, I’ve been waiting for Tom Walsingham to tackle the Babington Plot forever… And now, here we are! Only, it all starts most frustratingly for poor Tom… Continue reading
24 Sunday Dec 2023
Posted in Things
Tags
26 Friday May 2023
Posted in Books
Here we go! Today is the day!
Tom Walsingham is back in France – and right into the lion’s den!
It was never supposed to be the easiest of missions – but once Tom arrives in Rheims, deep into restless France, he finds that things are very different from what he and his powerful cousin, Sir Francis, had anticipated… And to find out just what threats are being prepared for Queen Elizabeth, this time our boy will have to take some really huge risks.
What’s worse, in theory he has plenty of support – but is there anyone he can really trust?
Aliases, betrayals, murders, looming war, lies aplenty, and a young rapscallion of a poet called Kit Marley… Tom is back for his most dangerous adventure yet!
Follow him as he tries to untangle, as Sir Francis would say, the joints and flexures of… Death in Rheims!
Book Three of the Tom Walsingham Mysteries is out today with Sapere Books. Findi it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats!
23 Thursday Feb 2023
Or very nearly: Death in Rheims, his third adventure, is up for preorder on Amazon, and will be available on 26 May! Continue reading
12 Thursday Jan 2023
Posted in Things
Tags
I’ve been neglecting my blogs in the most dreadful manner, lately. Can it be that I haven’t posted in five weeks? That I’ve even forgone the customary Christmas wishes? Oh dear me! The fact is, December was the tiniest tad intense – what with A Christmas Carol and handing in Tom Walsingham’s Book 3…
Then Christmas came – and then… January.
Because, really – I don’t know about you, but I rather loathe January… Continue reading
24 Thursday Nov 2022
Tony Riches is the author of of a number of richly researched, wonderfully vivid historical novels about several remarkable Tudor figures (and a few not-Tudor ones). Continue reading
17 Thursday Nov 2022
They are about fourteen, a baker’s dozen of them or so, and ever so slightly miffed, because they had to give up an hour of sports to have me talk to them. The fact is, they are taking extra-curricular drama classes this year, and they’ll be staging a shortened version of my own Nellie Bly play at the end – so the teachers thought it a good idea to have the author discuss the play with the class. Continue reading
10 Thursday Nov 2022
Posted in Scribbling, Things
Among the many wonders of the Internet, there is the huge abundance of dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses, lexicons, and such-like beautiful things.
I’ve always loved dictionaries of all sorts, old and new, and own shelves of them, and since a young age I’ve been known to ask Saint Lucia for the occasional dictionary as a gift… Apart from the obvious use, I just love to get lost among those columns of words, to make discoveries, to go on treasure hunts, to chase the elusive nuance of a meaning… Continue reading
Scribblings 