Carol was raised in a small village in the New Forest in southern England where she attended the local primary school. It was a very rural setting with herds of wild New Forest ponies roaming freely along the village roads. The merciless nagging at her parents resulted in the arrival of a borrowed bright-bay New Forest mare named Buzz. The pony was spherical, shaggy coated, one end kicked, the other definitely had teeth, and the mare had attitude. Her mother intended that Buzz would put her off ponies for life. It had the opposite outcome and started a life-long love affair with horses and the New Forest.
This survived a succession of increasingly larger ponies, further education, various sporty sidelines, Gold Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and boyfriends. It survived up-close and personal encounters with gorse bushes, bogs, peaty turf and the occasional solo walk home when she didn’t keep hold of the reins. It even survived marriage, motherhood and a diary-farming husband who neither liked nor trusted anything equine.
Following formal education and with an interest in forensics and police work Carol applied to join Hampshire Constabulary. Despite an attempt at subterfuge by piling her long hair on top of her head, her application was rejected as she did not meet the minimum height requirement.
Carol has always been seduced by the other worlds that existed beyond the isolated village where she grew up. Her first introduction to these was in rhymes and poems, and later in fairy tales and books. She was particularly interested in the characters that peopled these stories and their motivations. She thinks that her first actual telling of stories may have involved a dog and her missing homework.
Having settled into married life as a farmer’s wife, she helped care for a variety of livestock including dairy cows, beef cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, bantams, ducks, guinea fowl, dogs, cats and, of course, horses.
Throughout the farming years, Carol wrote short pieces for the farming press, Farmer’s Weekly and The Smallholder, and a series of articles for Animal World, an RSPCA magazine. In her role as a school governor, she wrote educational pieces related to unusual school projects such as the authentic reconstruction of an Iron Age hut for Junior Education.
Fiction followed, with the publication of short stories in magazines, and online publications such as Funny Pearls and Café Lit, both in the UK and overseas for the Spotlight magazine of Die Zeit in Germany. The broadcast of a play by BBC Wiltshire Sound and performances of other plays at literary festivals was followed by success in writing competitions including winning the CAMRA ghost story.
Carol has always liked puzzles and logic, and, along with her early interest in police work, is probably the reason she turned to the genre of crime when she began writing novels. Her first novel, Murder in the New Forest, was long listed in the Plaza Prizes crime category. She is a member of the Crime Writer’s Association.
Now retired from farming she lives in a rural village near the cathedral city of Salisbury with her husband and their two rescued feral cats, Amber and Opal.
