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!
In the beginning it was just “when the elder G. asks him about his plans to leave, 
This one is for T.
Such a lofty title, isn’t it? Very, very lofty for a post arguing that the human mind is, in several ways, an easily amused little hamster. Mine is, at least, and I’ll wager that yours is too – in several way – when it comes to motivation. 
I’d somehow managed to dodge it for more than two years and a half, but at last the plague caught me – or, in other word, I caught Covid at last. I suppose it was just a matter of time – and that I caught it at the theatre was just as inevitable as it was fitting.
What is your favourite writing software?
Once upon a time, there was a Small Writer with a Huge Deadline.
The world being what it is, I’ve found in a drawer 26 tiny paper disks – well, 27 if you count the debatable one… Less than an inch wide, not all of them perfect circles, each bearing a tiny – and often rather cryptic – note in orange or blue ink. 
I don’t know about you – but with me it’s like this: the closer I get to finishing a project, the more I slow down. 
It mostly comes in two flavours.
Scribblings 