Today it's my pleasure to welcome Helena Fairfax back to the blog to talk about her love of romantic suspense novels which inspired her latest novella The Scottish Diamond.
I love romantic suspense – J.D. Robb, Nora Roberts, and the old classics like Mary Stewart - but up until a couple of years ago it had never crossed my mind to have a try at writing in this genre. One day, though, I saw a call for submissions for a romantic suspense anthology. My mind began working subconsciously in that “What if…?” kind of way and shortly after seeing the call an idea for a story popped into my head, and I really wanted to write it down.
The story I dreamed up was a classic doppelgänger suspense, with a princess vanished in mysterious circumstances and a heroine who looks enough like her to play her part. Added to that was a handsome bodyguard, a housekeeper as creepy as Mrs Danvers, and a dramatic twist that surprised the heroine – and almost ruined everything for her.
To cut a long story short (pardon the pun!) the anthology didn’t go ahead, but the agent who had intended to put it together emailed me to tell me how much she’d loved my short story, and how she thought I should expand it into a novella.
I’d loved my characters, too, and I loved the idea of making the story longer, and especially of getting to know my bodyguard hero better :) And that’s how my novella Palace of Deception came about.
I released Palace of Deception last year as an ebook, and it will be published in large print next year. (At the moment, I’m offering all new subscribers to my newsletter a FREE copy of Palace of Deception. You can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/bRQtsT)
I thought Palace of Deception would be the end of my foray into romantic suspense but Lizzie and Léon – my Mediterranean bodyguard and Scottish heroine – refused to bow out so easily.
Sarah Hardy from By the Letter Book Reviews
One of my favourite books is actually one that I read fairly recently. It is a book by a new author which is her debut and is called Out Of The Darkness: A tale of love, loss and life after death by Katy Hogan.
There are many reasons why it is one of my favourite books but probably the main one was that I cried at the end because I didn't want it to end, which surely has to be the sign of a great book. I loved everything about the book, the story, the characters and that it made me feel a whole array of emotions.
Death is something that has always been at the back of my mind even as a child and I have constantly worried about it over the years, not just for me but also my family and what happens when we die. Through the story line and the characters losses it helped calm my fears and brought me some comfort when thinking of the future.
The book is far from doom and gloom though and I cried tears of joy as well as sadness and it is one of those books that I will definitely read again in the very near future.
Today I'm delighted to welcome Helena Fairfax to the blog to talk about her book A Way From Heart to Heart which was published last week.
After the death of her husband in Afghanistan, Kate Hemingway’s world collapses around her. Her free time is spent with a charity for teenage girls, helping them mend their broken lives - which is ironic, since her own life is fractured beyond repair.
Reserved, public school journalist Paul Farrell is everything Kate and her teenage charges aren’t. But when Paul agrees to help Kate with her charity, he makes a stunning revelation that changes everything, and leaves Kate torn.
Can she risk her son’s happiness as well as her own?
Can you tell us a little bit about your latest book, A Way from Heart to Heart?
A Way from Heart to Heart is the story of a young woman who loses the husband she adored to a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. At first sight, Kate’s story seems quite stark, but as the novel progresses, you see that there are so many strands of love woven around Kate, through her son, through her best friend, and through her husband’s oldest friend, who has always been there for her, though the darkest times.
Where did the inspiration come from to write about rebuilding a life following the death of a loved one, especially one killed in Afghanistan?
I sometimes find it hard to pinpoint where my initial ideas spring from. This particular idea just seemed to come to me fully-fledged and felt “right”. I’d suffered myself from the loss of a loved one, and maybe subconsciously I wanted to write my way through the pain of loss. Of course as an author you have power of life and death over your characters. I wrote about a husband who died in Afghanistan because I wanted to show that deaths in war torn countries aren’t just another news item that we can forget about next day. They happen to real people, whose deaths affect the loved ones left behind for ever.
