The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Miranda Malins, author of The Puritan Princess, has returned to the Cromwell’s and provided a real treat: a step back in time, to the 1640s, to trace the family’s uneasy rise to power. This time, however, a different Cromwell daughter - Bridget - takes centre stage....
A Dangerous Trade was the first in your Queen’s Spies thrillers, set in Elizabethan England and involving the interweaving fates of Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots – there were plenty of plots throughout Elizabeth I’s reign. Did any real-life plots make it...
Immediately the tone of The Woman Who Risked Everything is introduced as one that is tense and threatening. The Prologue takes the reader to a point in the future, demonstrating how the novel will escalate. The tension in this small section is built effectively as our...
In his debut thriller, The Perfect Corpse, Giles Milton combines his mastery of strong narratives and his attention to historical detail to produce a page-turner as gripping as the best of Robert Harris. When a frozen corpse is found in Greenland ice — assumed to be...
Lily Graham’s latest novel, The Last Restaurant in Paris, begins in 1980s France, where living memories of World War Two are slowly fading to just the older generations of the population. Yet when a young librarian, Sabine Dupris, inherits a restaurant from her...
At the beginning of A Reluctant Assassin, by John Pilkington, we are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, Will Revill. This starts a sense of intrigue that continues throughout the novel, as the reader is left clues about Revill’s past role in the military, and what...
In 1940 Hitler launched a bombing campaign against London. This blitz as the British press described it, failed to affect British fighting capacity or morale. However, in 1941 many other towns and cities in Britain were also targeted by German bombers, as the emphasis...
Mark Turnbull’s The King's Cavalier is a well-written and excellently-researched historical story, detailing the real tale of King Charles I escape from Hampton Court and his captivity on the Isle of Wight. The story is primarily told through the author’s own...
You’ve written quite extensively on ancient Rome, beyond the two short tales set in Rome in The Die is Cast. There's the Sword of Rome, Sword of Empire and Augustus Caesar series, to name a few; what has attracted you most to write about this period? Fundamentally,...
The Partisan by Patrick Worrall. After attaining their independence at the end of the First World War, the Baltic countries suffered the misfortune of being invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 and then by Nazi Germany in 1941 and again by the Soviet Union in 1944....
