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!
Among the many wonders of the Internet, there is the huge abundance of dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses, lexicons, and such-like beautiful things.
Yesterday I spent a good deal of time perusing lists of names of Guild members in 16th century Bruges. It’s one of the many wonders of the Internet that you can find this sort of thing for the asking… and, as I said, I ended up spending a good chunk of the afternoon going through list after list, copying the promising ones in my notebook – one column for given names, one for family names – trying them out for size, and even involving a Dutch-speaking friend for a sense of how a few of them would be pronounced… 
The 18th century is lazily going by in the fictional English town of Airenchester, when we meet hour hero, Thaddeus Grainger, the type of young gentleman of means and taste. A bright, clever, careless boy in the words of his doting housekeeper, Thaddeus is in equal parts bored and disillusioned when it comes to the fine society he confidently belongs to, but that is the way of things, and what is a fellow to do – except navigate the currents, and keep apart from the worst of it? In fact, Thaddeus’s only rebellion is to cultivate the close friendship of reasonably genteel but penniless William Quilby, a vicar’s son and journalist… 
In the middle of it all – and by “it all” I mean tech week for my own translation and adaptation of A Christmas Carol, opening this Saturday – I’ve had a lovely surprise: my story was longlisted for the 
As I was busy completing the la(te)st revision of my novel before pitching it at the HNS Conference in Scotland, I came across 
Scribblings 