Rae of Light

I’m back from my summer holiday and it was a corker. The villa, up in the hills of an area called Teramala in the Sant’Elena quarter, was comfy and had more or less all the comforts of home. It was of course a fair ways away from the centre of things in Cagliari (a good hour away by bus and they’re not frequent. Nor do Sardinian bus timetables and arrivals of said bus bear any relation to each other.) Somehow, when you’re on holiday in sunny foreign parts where rain is a word scarcely used, this does not irk you as it would if you were here in Blighty. The views from the villa were spectacular. And I’m not exaggerating. Cagliari itself, though hilly (9 of them to be exact) is easy to get around and the food splendid wherever you go. Even the tiniest supermarket has a plethora of cheeses and cold meats to choose from with tons of farm produce in the fruit and veg aisles. The buses, though erratic on the outskirts, were pretty reliable in the city itself and the price of ticket...

Originally a guest post which featured on Murder Underground Broke the Camel's Back First of all I have to state categorically that I did not plan on writing Palindrome . I was adamant there would be no sequel to my debut novel Six Dead Men as I was already working on several other ideas. Denial is futile. This prequel insisted on being written. Its conception is due to a vivid dream I had in which a woman was remembering the day her baby was born. I woke with the realisation that it was Robert’s mother I was hearing. I grabbed a notebook and hastily jotted down the gist of what she had to say. At the time I was concentrating on other projects but several of the characters kept demanding I tell the world more about them. So Six Degrees a la Kevin Bacon style was conceived. It’s a series of 6 vignettes which focus on the back story of Six Dead Men . This little collection hints at links between characters and situations.   I thought this would mollify my nagging cha...