Hi I'm Rosemarie and I like to write. I write short stories and longer fiction, poetry and occasionally articles. I'm working on quite a few things at the minute and wouldn't mind one day actually getting published in print.
Before Roxy found herself “Single in Buenos Aires,” she was a single girl in London in search of true love. The third installment of The Polo Diaries series takes us back to that time, and we follow Roxy as she hires a love coach to help her navigate the dating scene. But the love coach comes up with an unexpected assignment: reconnect to a long-forgotten passion. For Roxy this means horses. Within weeks, she finds herself playing polo, thanks to a series of unforeseen events.
Torn between her desire to become the best polo player she can be and the dream of falling in love, Roxy steps fully into the exciting and demanding world of polo, where injury and recovery mix with hard training, and where celebrating the victory of a tournament comes at a high price. Will Roxy eventually become the polo player she dreams to be? And with polo being such a demanding sport, can there be any space left for love?
Aussie Jill arrives in Edinburgh at Festival time, at the start of a gap year. Unfortunately, her boss at the temporary job she’s taken turns out to be her grumpy neighbour, Andrew, aka Mr Bossy. As the Festival fireworks explode over the city every night, they start to fall in love. Then Jill has to return suddenly to Australia. Can their budding romance survive or will the fireworks fizzle and die?
Extract
She wondered what Mr. MacCallum-Blair would be like. Late fifties, she thought, balding, with a large stomach and a pinstripe suit. Or perhaps fortyish with longish hair and lurid ties, a live-in girlfriend who works in advertising or as a model, and….
Jill was so busy conjuring up her new boss’s lifestyle that she had passed the number before she realised it. She quickly doubled back and ran up the broad steps to the entrance to number 76. According to the nameplate, MacCallum-Blair Enterprises was on the first floor. She buzzed and gave her name, then waited for the click of the door’s release.
She ran up the stairs and, as she turned to climb the final flight, she was surprised to see a woman sitting at a desk at the top of the stairs, watching her ascent.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I take it you’re from the agency?’
‘Yes, I’m Jill Kennedy.’
The woman nodded. ‘Take a seat,’ she said, gesturing at an armchair in the corner next to a coffee table of glossy magazines.
Like an upmarket dentist’s, Jill thought, and I feel exactly as if I was going to have several teeth pulled.
The phone rang and, while the woman answered it, Jill took the opportunity to size her up. After all, she would probably be working quite closely with her. Early forties, neatly dressed in a dark blue trouser suit, with a pale lilac patterned blouse and wedding and engagement rings. Not the boss’s fancy woman. Probably the PA she was replacing had that role. Or maybe Mr. MacCallum-Blair was happily married. Here’s hoping, at any rate. She didn’t fancy having to cope with amorous advances as well as the new workload.
‘Mr. MacCallum-Blair will see you now.’ The woman pointed to a dark wooden door. ‘Just go in. He’s taking a call at the moment, but he won’t be long.’
Jill tapped on the door and went in. The room was dominated by two long picture windows, through which Jill could see the trees in the private gardens. A nice outlook for the boss then. In front of the windows was a wide, old-fashioned desk with a very modern laptop sitting on it. Mr. MacCallum-Blair had swivelled his chair round to face out of the window while he took the call. While he ummed and said ‘Right’ and ‘Fine’ to his caller, Jill took the opportunity to admire the high ceiling decorated with an elaborate cornice of grapes, vine leaves, and flowers, and a centrepiece, similarly decorated, surrounding the base of a chandelier.
It’s stunning, she thought, as she admired the crystal pendants waterfalling from their fixture. The light from the windows caught them, and glints flashed around the ceiling and walls. She was enchanted.
‘Good God, not you,’ said a voice.
Ann Burnett has been writing for many years and covers many genres. She wrote Postman Pat stories for a comic for five years, adapted Moomin stories as picture books, and scripted over 100 programmes for BBC children’s TV and radio. She also writes short stories and articles and has even tried poetry and drama!
Her latest writing is a contemporary romance, Festival Fireworks, for Ladybug Publications.
She was once almost sold to a Masai warrior for two cows but was only saved because her husband wouldn’t have been able to get the cows on the plane home!
One woman’s quest for revenge unearths a fatal secret from her past.
Astrid Jensen holds one man responsible for her mother’s suicide, and she’ll do whatever’s necessary to get close to Daniel Holst and destroy his life – even if it means sleeping with him to gain his trust. Astrid knows he’s not who he pretends to be. But before she can reveal his dark secret, people from her mother’s past start turning up dead, and it looks like she and Daniel are next. In order to survive, she might have to put her trust in the man she has hated for so long.
Daniel Holst has worked hard to climb into Norway’s most elite and glamorous circles, and he’s not about to let any woman bring him down. But when a psychopathic killer starts murdering people from his shadowy past, he discovers that the only person who might be able to save him is the woman who wants to destroy him.
As Astrid digs deeper into her past, she uncovers secrets long buried and realizes everything she once believed is based on lies. What began as a quest to avenge her mother’s death becomes a desperate struggle for survival and leads to the truth about what happened one fatal night ten years ago—and the surprising mastermind behind the most recent murders.
Author Bio
Hélene is an Anglo-Swedish fiction author currently residing in her home town of Malmo, Sweden, after relocating back from London after 20 years.
Her thrilling character-driven psychological fiction novels are known for their explosive, pacy narrative and storylines.
Hélene is the proud author of four novels – One Fatal Night, Because of You, We Never Said Goodbye and His Guilty Secret.
ISBN: 9781526738608 Published: 18th September 2019 £15.99
Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly are inextricably linked in history. Their names might not be instantly recognisable, and the identity of their murderer may have eluded detectives and historians throughout the years, but there is no mistaking the infamy of Jack the Ripper.
For nine weeks during the autumn of 1888, the Whitechapel Murderer brought terror to London’s East End, slashing women’s throats and disembowelling them. London’s most famous serial killer has been pored over time and again, yet his victims have been sorely neglected, reduced to the simple label: prostitute.
The lives of these five women are rags-to-riches-to-rags stories of the most tragic kind. There was a time in each of their lives when these poor women had a job, money, a home and a family. Hardworking, determined and fiercely independent individuals, it was bad luck, or a wrong turn here or there, that left them wretched and destitute. Ignored by the press and overlooked by historians, it is time their stories were told.
Northumberland…to the Romans it was Ad Fines, the limit of the Empire, the end of the Roman World. It was here in 122 AD that the Emperor Hadrian decided to build a wall stretching from coast-to-coast to provide protection, to show the might of the Empire, and as a statement of his grandeur. Visitors to Northumberland can walk the Wall visiting milecastles, Roman frontier forts and settlements such as Housesteads (where you can see the oldest toilets you’ll ever see) or Vindolanda (where you can take part in an archaeological dig) where wooden tablets detailing life on this frontier (the oldest example of written language in Britain) were discovered, or the remains of Roman temples and shrines (such as the Mithraeum at Carrawburgh). After the Romans left, Northumberland became the heart of one of the greatest kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain, Northumbria. The home of Saints, scholars and warrior kings. Visitors can see the ancient seat of this kingdom at the medieval Bamburgh Castle, visit Hexham Abbey (built in 674 AD), or tour the magnificent remains of the 7th century Priory at Tynemouth (where three kings are buried – Oswin (d. 651), Osred (d. 790), and the Scottish King Malcolm III (d. 1093).
No other county in Britain has as many medieval remains as Northumberland. From the most grand such as Alnwick Castle (known as the Windsor of the North, the home of the Dukes of Northumberland, the capital of Northumberland, and, to many, Hogwarts!) to humble remains such as the Chantry at Morpeth. At Warkworth visitors can tour the medieval church (scene of a 12th century Scottish massacre), Warkworth Castle (another Percy possession and the setting for a scene in Shakespeare’s Henry IV), a medieval hermitage, and the fortified bridge gatehouse (one of the only surviving examples in Britain).
Northumberland was ravaged during the Anglo-Scottish Wars and this led to the development of family clans of Border Reivers who were active during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Raiders, looters, blackmailers and courageous cavalrymen the Reivers have left many surviving remnants of their harsh time. Peel Towers dot the landscape alongside Bastle Houses. The active can even walk in the footsteps of the Reivers by following the Reivers Way long distance path.
Victorian Northumberland was dominated by both farming and, increasingly, by the industrial genius of some of its entrepreneurs. The greatest of these, Lord Armstrong (known as the Magician of the North), has left behind one of the most magnificent tourist sites in Britain; his home at Cragside. Carved from a bare hillside and transplanted with millions of trees and shrubs and crowned with the beautiful Cragside House visitors can walk the grounds taking advantage of various trails and spotting wildlife such as red squirrels before visiting the first house in the world to be lit by electricity!
John Morgan was born in the UK in 1938 and qualified there as a chartered surveyor.
He moved to Zurich for three years in 1969 to work for a US conglomerate.
He then moved to Germany, where he eventually established a successful property consultancy firm together with a Dutch partner, selling this in due course to a German bank.
John has a German wife and four sons and now lives in retirement on Lake Constance. Having dual nationality and conversing today mostly in German, he is now uncertain whether he is British or German!
Everything Is Better With Dragons 