The cover design for The Price of Silence has won two awards!! Cover of the Month in December, and joint runner-up for Cover of the Year. Many thanks to Chill With A Book, though all credit must go to the design team at SilverWood Books, who came up trumps with that jacket.  The novel itself – for which I CAN take some credit! – also won a  Premier Readers Award from Chill With A Book. These accolades came at a time, just before Christmas, when I feeling a bit low, disillusioned with the whole process of writing and getting published, promoting my titles and hoping for feedback. So, thank you, Pauline Barclay of Chill With A Book – just the boost I needed!

The cover image of the original version of the novel, published as an eBook in 2011, was a great picture but quite wrong – as I realized after I’d published it! The setting didn’t look contemporary, and it looked urban. All those years ago, of course, I didn’t have access to the expertise of professional designers – and it does make all the difference.

The jacket of the rewrite published in November 2019 is spot on – trees dominating a main road, car headlights emerging from mist or fog in the distance…  Holly Macleod, the murder victim in The Price of Silence, waits in a lay-by beside a busy road into Barbury, but in the shadows surrounding the public toilets there, terror lurks. Holly isn’t far from the town, from the college buildings across the road, from the roundabout where traffic gets snarled up at each end of the day. And yet she could be miles from anywhere, and her killer knows how vulnerable she is there. The cover design seems to sum all that up, and I love it!

I’m working on the fourth Jeff Lincoln title, The Promise of Salvation,  and after lots of false starts and restarts, I feel I’m on the right track. The novel opens as the bones of a little girl are found on the edge of Greywood Forest, a little girl who disappeared from a funfair nearly twenty years ago. Does Detective Inspector Lincoln have a hope in hell of finding out who killed her after so long? And what about those rumours he heard last year about children in care taken to sex parties at some rich man’s house? And will he ever finish renovating the Old Vicarage?

My books are available online from Amazon and from SilverWood Books; from The History Bookshop at Fisherton Mill, Fisherton Street, Salisbury; and from 36 Salisbury, the popup shop in the High Street, opposite Boston Tea Party.