Category Archives: Domestic noir

Happy National Book Lovers Day!

Today is National Book Lovers Day!

I happen to love books every day of the year. There’s nothing better than curling up with a good book, whether it’s an ebook or print.

Book
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

How will you celebrate, participate?

There are many genres out there to choose from – crime, romance, erotica, YA, memoirs, creative non-fiction, non-fiction and the list goes on.

All these main genres have a multitude of sub-genres as well, so there is something out there for everyone’s taste in reading.

I write romance, primarily, although YESTERDAY TODAY ALWAYS has a psychological thriller element included. It’s probably my darkest work yet. I remember when I was having the computer read it back to me, my husband entered my ‘writing cave’, and the particular segment scared him. I guess I nailed the creepy, unnerving bit.

You can check out all my books on the novels page on my website. Perhaps, you’ll find a little something to your liking.

In what format do you prefer to read your book?

Are you a hardcover fan? Paperback (trade size or mass market)? E-book (kindle, kobo, nook, or other)? Or do you read from a combination of all of the above?

Leave a comment stating what your favourite genre and format is. I’d love to hear your thoughts and preferences.

It’s National Book Lovers Day!

Today is National Book Lovers Day!

National Book Lovers Day
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

How will you celebrate, participate?

This year on National Book Lovers Day, I currently have two books on the go – one fiction, one non. Thunder Bay by Douglas Skelton is a crime novel set in Scotland.

The non-fiction is Marketing Matters by Wendy H Jones. Right now, I need all the help I can get in this department.

In addition to reading, I’m also working on Book 3 in my It Happened series set in the village of Percé on the Gaspé Peninsula of the province of Quebec.

Since the COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve struggled with writing, but my reading has flourished. According to my 2020 Goodreads challenge, I’m nine books ahead of schedule. That should give you an idea of how I’ve been spending much of my spare time.

Some of these books were already on my TBR (to be read) list having languished on my shelves or Kindle for some time. Others were new purchases that I just “had” to get. Still, others were review copies.

What to read?

There are many genres out there to choose from – crime, romance, erotica, YA, memoirs, creative non-fiction, and the list goes on.

All these main genres have a multitude of sub-genres as well, so there is something out there for everyone’s taste in reading.

I write romance, primarily, although YESTERDAY TODAY ALWAYS has a psychological thriller element included. It’s probably my darkest work yet. I remember when I was having the computer read it back to me, my husband entered my ‘writing cave’, and the particular segment scared him. I guess I nailed the creepy, unnerving bit.

You can check out all my books on the novels page on my website. Perhaps, you’ll find a little something to your liking.

What format do you prefer to read?

Are you a hardcover fan? Paperback (trade size or mass market)? E-book (kindle, kobo, nook, or other)? Or do you read from a combination of all of the above?

Leave a comment staying what your favourite genre and format is. I’d love to hear your thoughts and preferences.

SHADOWS by Thorne Moore #domestic #noir #paranormal

Shadows
by
Thorne Moore

 

Thorne MooreGenre: domestic noir. Psychological Crime. Women’s lit. Paranormal.

Release Date: 14 June 2017

Publisher: Endeavour Press

Kate Lawrence can sense the shadow of violent death, past and present. In her struggle to cope with her unwelcome gift, she has frozen people out of her life. Her marriage is on the rocks, her career is in chaos and she urgently needs to get a grip.

So she decides to start again, by joining her effervescent cousin Sylvia and partner Michael in their mission to restore and revitalise Llys y Garn, an old mansion in the wilds of North Pembrokeshire.
It is certainly a new start, as she takes on Sylvia’s grandiose schemes, but it brings Kate to a place that is thick with the shadows of past deaths. The house and grounds are full of mysteries that only she can sense, but she is determined to face them down – so determined that she fails to notice that ancient energies are not the only shadows threatening the seemingly idyllic world of Llys y Garn.

The happy equilibrium is disrupted by the arrival of Sylvia’s sadistic and manipulative son, Christian – but just how dangerous is he?
Then, once more, Kate senses that a violent death has occurred…
Set in the majestic and magical Welsh countryside, Shadows is a haunting exploration of the dark side of people and landscape.

EXTRACT

‘Is it haunted, Kate?’ Sylvia clapped her hands, like a child wanting ice-cream. ‘Oh please, please say there’s a ghost down here.’

‘There’s a ghost down here.’

‘No seriously, please tell me. You’d sense one, I know.’

What the hell. I closed my eyes solemnly. ‘I detect – a definite shiver of fear.’

‘Is that all? I was hoping for a white lady. If only we had battlements. I’m sure we’d have had a white lady, walking in the moonlight.’

‘Perhaps we can persuade one to move in.’

‘Yes!’ Sylvia gripped my arm. ‘A ghost hotel! We could get a licence to serve spirits!’

We were still laughing as we climbed back to the buttery. To finish, she led me on into the second small room, under the upper chamber.

As before, a low square room. One tiny window, two doors, stained walls, stone floor, just another empty room. ‘Not sure what to call this one,’ babbled my cousin. ‘Think of a good name. The armoury! I wonder if we could get a suit of armour.’ She was already opening the far door, into a panelled arch through deep masonry back into the Great Hall.

Just a doorway to Sylvia.

But not to me. Oh God, not to me.

‘Come on,’ she sang. ‘Where next?’

I watched her pass through, amazed that she could sense nothing. Rigid in my determination to conquer, I followed her, trying to block out the shadow, to refuse it entry into my brain.

I couldn’t. It overwhelmed my defences, enveloping me in a black cloud. Huge atavistic fear, searing thirst, gut-wrenching despair. I could feel the interweaving strands of emotion like filaments of rot, tightening around me, meshing in my lungs, my veins, my bones. How could Sylvia possibly not feel this?

BUY LINKS

AMAZON UK

AMAZON US

ABOUT THORNE MOORE

Thorne Moore

Thorne was born in Luton and graduated from Aberystwyth University (history) and from the Open University (Law). She set up a restaurant with her sister but now spends her time writing and making miniature furniture for collectors. She lives in Pembrokeshire, which forms a background for much of her writing, as does Luton. She writes psychological mysteries, or “domestic noir,” and her first novel, A Time For Silence, was published by Honno in 2012. Her second Motherlove, was published in 2015 and her third, The Unravelling, came out in 2016. A collection of short stories, Moments of Consequence, came out the same year. She’s a member of the Crime Writers Association.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thornemoorenovelist

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThorneMoore

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6562052.Thorne_Moore

Blog: http://thornemoore.blogspot.co.uk

Website: www.thornemoore.co.uk

THE MAN IN THE NEEDLECORD JACKET ~ by Linda MacDonald #domestic #noir

needlecord jacket

The Man in the Needlecord Jacket

by

Linda MacDonald

needlecord jacket

Genre: Adult contemporary fiction; Domestic Noir

Release Date: 28th May 2017

Publisher: Matador – An imprint of Troubador Publishing

The Man in the Needlecord Jacket follows the story of two women who are each struggling to let go of a long-term destructive partnership. Felicity is reluctant to detach from her estranged archaeologist husband and, after being banished from the family home, she sets out to test the stability of his relationship with his new love, Marianne.

When Felicity meets Coll, a charismatic artist, she has high hopes of being distracted from her failed marriage. What she doesn’t know is that he has a partner, Sarah, with whom he has planned a future. Sarah is deeply in love with Coll, but his controlling behaviour and associations with other women have always made her life difficult. When he becomes obsessed with Felicity, Sarah’s world collapses and a series of events is set in motion that will challenge the integrity of all the characters involved.

The Man in the Needlecord Jacket is a thought-provoking book, written from the perspectives of Sarah and Felicity. The reader is in the privileged position of knowing what’s going on for both of the women, while each of them is being kept in the dark about a very important issue.

Inspired by the work of Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon, Linda explores the issue of mental abuse in partnerships and the grey area of an infidelity that is emotional, not physical. The book will appeal to readers interested in the psychology of relationships, as well as fans of Linda’s ‘Lydia’ series.

BUY LINKS

AMAZON UK

AMAZON US

TROUBADOR

ABOUT LINDA MACDONALD

needlecord jacket

Linda MacDonald is the author of three independently published novels: Meeting Lydia and the stand-alone sequels, A Meeting of a Different Kind and The Alone Alternative. They are all contemporary adult fiction, multi-themed, but with a focus on relationship issues.

After studying psychology at Goldsmiths’, Linda trained as a secondary science and biology teacher. She taught these subjects for several years before moving to a sixth-form college to teach psychology. In 2012, she gave up teaching to focus fully on writing.

Linda was born and brought up in Cockermouth, Cumbria and now lives in Beckenham, Kent.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MeetingLydia/

Twitter: @LindaMac1

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4870870.Linda_MacDonald

GIVEAWAY

First prize signed paperback book bundle of all of Linda’s 4 books with 3 recipe cards and a bookmark. (uk only)

Second prize signed copy of The Man in the Needlecord Jacket + 3 recipe cards and bookmark (uk only) OR  an ecopy of The Man in the Needlecord Jacket (International participants.)

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THE UNRAVELLING by Thorne Moore #guestpost #giveaway

unravelling

The Unravelling

by

Thorne Moore

 

unravelling

Genre: Domestic noir

Release Date: 21 July 2016

Publisher: Honno Press

From the Top Ten Bestselling Author of A Time for Silence

The Unravelling

When they were ten everybody wanted to be Serena’s friend, to find themselves one of the inner circle. But doing so meant proving your worth, and doing that often had consequences it’s not nice to think about – not even thirty-five years later.

Karen Rothwell is randomly reminded of an incident in her childhood which just as suddenly becomes an obsession. It takes her on a journey into a land of secrets and lies; it means finding that gang of girls from Marsh Green Junior School and most importantly of all finding Serena Whinn.

 Praise for Thorne Moore’s novels

‘A true page turner’– www.gwales.com

‘The most chilling part of Thorne Moore’s skill is the way that she represents evil’ – Helen Tozer, sideline jelly

BUY LINKS

HONNO PRESS

AMAZON UK

AMAZON US

 BOOK DEPOSITORY

WORDERY

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Things I learned when writing this book

I learned that I have the potential to be a really bad driver. I think I am a moderately good driver (I am too modest to put it higher than that), but my main character, Karen Rothwell, is bad. The sort of driver who’d make you slam on the brakes and take the next turn onto a different route. I found it extraordinarily easy to get inside her head and perceive such obstacles as roundabouts and motorway junctions as problems best approached with the eyes shut. So easy that I worry I might be tempted to do so, just for the hell of it.

I learned that I am old. You know old people say “I can remember everything that happened fifty years ago, but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast today.” That is me, with this book. My main character, Karen Rothwell, is my age, because I thought that would make it easier, getting the details of her childhood right. In 1965, she’s ten, going on 11, in the fourth year of junior school, just as I was. It isn’t a date I dared mess with, because a few years later, everything would have been different. This was before 1967, before Sgt Pepper, before beads and kaftans and women’s lib. The Beatles may have been a big thing, but they were still in nice smart suits.

1965 was really the tail end of the 1950s. Children hadn’t yet been liberated into jeans and T-shirts. Little girls wore cotton frocks and ankle socks in summer, long socks, kilts and cardies in winter. Little boys wore pullovers and short trousers. Everyone had scabby knees. We had little bottles of milk at school playtime and cabbage for dinner. People lived in council houses and travelled on buses. They shopped at local butchers and greengrocers and made phone calls in red phone boxes, remembering to push Button A. You could get a decent bar of chocolate for 3d, and swings were set in concrete that could break your nose, and made of proper solid wood that could knock your teeth out. None of this health and safety nonsense.

We walked to school every morning. I’m not sure even the teachers bothered to drive, although one did have a bubble car. My routes, and there were several, led through an estate that was in transition. Among the streets of council houses, prefabs were coming down to make way for tower blocks because nobody had yet realised that the British don’t do high-rise living. A motorway was being built alongside the school playing field. Underneath it all was the ghost of what had been there just a decade or two before: farmhouses and fields and woods and streams. A few massive trees lingered. There was a huge wild cherry which stood opposite my house, until continuous lopping away to make room for buses made it give up the ghost. Roads were named after farms that no longer existed. Brooks, reduced to drainage ditches, appeared and disappeared among the houses. And there was a lane, one of my routes home, unpaved, muddy and overhung with trees, just wide enough for the horse and cart that would once have used it.

Karen’s flashbacks, in the book, refer to that era and I could conjure up every detail of it, with no trouble at all. It’s all in my DNA. But much of the action is also set at the turn of this century, the Millennium or thereabouts, and that is only 16 years ago, so I should be able to remember it as well, if not better, than the 1960s, but I couldn’t. I had to research it. It’s not the events of the time that evade me. They are easy enough to recall. It’s the technology. We have the internet now. We had it then too, of course. Our houses rang with weird sci-fi dialling tones as we plugged our modems into our phone lines and waited to see if the thing would ever connect. On our new and improved Windows 98, we hastily searched for what we wanted on Yahoo, and God help us if our chosen site had pictures, because they would take forever to load, and we were worried about the phone bill. And we’d better be quick because someone else wanted to use the phone.

Not that we had that much to look at, when we were connected. There was a site called Amazon, which sold books, just books, and a new search engine had appeared, called Google, but Facebook and Twitter were not yet even gleams in the milkman’s eye. Not much point in relying on the internet until broadband was introduced. That was in 2000 but it was several years before it really caught on. Since when, it has become so essential, many of us can’t imagine life without it.

Like mobile phones. Of course people had mobile phones in 2000. Some of them, anyway, and they were no longer the huge bricks flaunted by the yuppies of the 80s. They were smaller bricks, and unless you were young and frivolous, you kept them switched off, for emergencies, for fear of running the batteries down. If you were of a certain age, (over 20) you would quiver hopelessly at the thought of texting.

Books, in 2000, came in two formats. Hardback and paperback.

Sat Navs? If you wanted to get from A to B you consulted your AA Atlas.

It can come as a shock to realise how much our personal worlds have changed in less than 20 years. It was only as I wrote The Unravelling, that I fully appreciated it. Must be getting old.

At least I do still remember what I had for breakfast this morning. Yoghurt. Or was that yesterday?

I learned that sometimes I need someone to say yes very loudly, straight at me, in order to drown out the voice in my head that keeps saying no, no, no, no. I began writing The Unravelling about 30 years ago. And stopped. I began it again about 20 years ago and stopped again. And 15 and 12 and 10 and 8. I think I have one of those early drafts still on an Amstrad word processor disc, no longer readable. An early draft of the first two or three chapters, that is, because each time I started, even though I knew who the characters would be and where they should be going, I just came to a full stop and moved on to something completely different. Then the editor of my last book asked me if I were working on anything else. I mentioned the idea of The Unravelling. She said good! Write it. So I did.

**********

ABOUT THORNE MOORE

unravelling

Thorne Moore was born in Luton but has lived in in the back of beyond in north Pembrokeshire for 32 years. She has degrees in History and Law, worked in a library and ran a family restaurant as well as a miniature furniture craft business, which is still in Production, but she now concentrates on writing psychological crime mysteries.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thorne.moore.7

Twitter: @ThorneMoore

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6562052.Thorne_Moore

Blog: http://thornemoore.blogspot.co.uk/

Website: thornemoore.co.uk

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