Ghosties, goulies and long legged beasties....

Hallowene is around the corner, time for amateurs to scare themselves silly with esoteric magic and spook raising.

I research all my books thoroughly.  This murder mystery at Hallowene even scared me during the research!  Writing horror is difficult. Writiers have to have experienced the feelings of their characters to certain extent and fill in the rest with imagination.

In this book, there is voodoo magic, zombies, ghosts, necromancing, murder, and an encounter with a sexual ghost or two.  One of my readers said she thought I wouldn't be able to get away with this sort of writing but said it made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck - which I took to be a good thing!

As for me, I have never actually seen a ghost materialise. I have seen orbs and photographed them with my ghost camera, it's a strange thing, we bought this little compact camera as ours got broken on holiday, and it often produced photographs of manifestations.

In Cornwall my house was the mine captain's house, built over the tunnels of the Levant Mine. In the 1919s there was a huge collapse inside the mine, killing 31 miners. Periodically they would turn up in our lounge or our next door neighbours. It seemed they didn't realise they had died. One New Years Eve we were all dressed up in Fancy Dress to go to the St Ives New Year Party, and jokingly as I set up the camera I said, "Come on guys, I know you're there - get in the picture."  They did - the picture showed hubby, son and me in our best Pirates of the Caribbean outfits with two orbs shining brightly either side of us, and three at knee level as if they were getting into the picture by crouching down in front of us.

Sue next door often saw half a person (legs and cream trousers)climbing her stairs. She also heard knocking under the floor. Both our houses were built on solid granite so work that one out!

The second book Murder at Overdown Manor is the conclusion and a journey back to normality of some sort.

My character Hilary gets her former high flying life back, it was meant to be the conclusion of the Hilary Long Mysteries for a while, so I could write another history book. But my readers and the characters themselves seemed to want to re-appear. So my next book about the lives of those in Overdown is nearly finished, a serial killer, a loss of several key characters, and Hilary back on the detective trail with a broken heart.

I hope you get to read and enjoy them as much as I enjoyed and scared myself writing them.

On Amazon Kindle now. The Overdown Chronicles with new stories will be out in paperback later this year - hopefully in time for Christmas.