Working Title: Legs Akimbo

This was the first book I wrote for Little Brown and I wanted to give them the moon on a plate, so I pulled out all the stops, twisting my plot as tight as can be, parading a bright spectacle of characters, adding lots of literary references and lashings of lust, and taking the setting to the coast for the first time in a Fiona Walker book. All those rugged cliffs and the flying sea spray was hugely entertaining, as was writing an alter ego. I adore complicated, brooding Jago Byrnes as a hero – I think the West Country setting brings out the du Maurier urges in every writer – and his dog is bionic amongst bassets. As a heroine, Allegra is something of an innocent abroad, which makes for rich pickings in an idiosyncratic coastal fishing village.

Trivial fact: I set the book in the Hartland Peninsular where I had once spent a month locked up in a cottage trying to finish the ill-fated Tanked Up (see my insight into Lots of Love).  Despite my lack of muse there, the place stayed with me and was a delight to go back to and write about. It’s the old cliché of nothing being wasted on an author.

Video: All my old promotional videos are thankfully lost to a YouTube declutter, buried on a CDRom somewhere – or worse still VHS – and visitors to this site are spared them, but one does remain – my homespun first and thusfar only ‘vlog’. The link is here.