Killer in the New Forest is proving popular, and book 4 is underway!

Thank you for your kind words about the book, and for getting hold of a copy. I hope you enjoy reading it. I must also thank the team at The Book Folks, and Joffee Books for their excellent book cover, and all their hard work that goes on behind the scenes prior to publication.

Book four, as yet untitled, is underway. Not much to say about that yet, except that it is set in Downton and Hale.

Many of you have asked about Callum so I thought I would take this opportunity to fill you in on his background.

Callum MacLean was born in Airdrie – Clarkston Drive, as it happens – the youngest of four children. He has three sisters; Dolina, the oldest is a bossy organiser; Freya, the middle one is the peacemaker; and Shona, who was the indulged baby, before Callum came along. The girls are all strong individuals, who can all stand their ground, and disagreed on practically everything they could disagree on which made for a noisy household.

The one thing that united them like a band of vengeful Valkyries was protecting their ‘wee man’, the pet name they had for Callum. They adored him, second guessed his needs and encouraged him.

His paternal grandfather lived on Seil Island on the west coast of Scotland. It is one of the slate islands and is accessed by a humpbacked stone Clachan bridge over the Atlantic. During the school holidays Callum spent some time each summer with his grandparents. His grandfather was a tall, athletic and largely silent man whose hobby, when the work was done, was sketching and painting. Of an evening, he would sit before his peat fire, chew on the stem of his pipe and make a drawing of the things that had happened to him during the day. He passed this habit onto the young Callum who found it much more appealing to draw his day than to wrestle with words he couldn’t spell. When we first meet Callum in Murder in the New Forest, like his grandfather, he keeps a pictorial diary of his day.

Callum is tall, athletically built and wears his dark hair traditionally long, often tied back in a ponytail. He is quiet, self-contained and slow to anger. After university he joined police Scotland and was stationed in Glasgow. He met Grace, fell hook, line and sinker and married her. They had a flat in Kelvinside and Callum added this new dimension to his life and was the happiest he had ever been.

Then Grace died. Her heart attack left him alone, disbelieving and unable to cope. His family rallied around him, his friends supported him, and his colleagues wanted the old Callum back. Unable to breath with the level of concern he was subject to and convinced that he had been set up with every single female in Glasgow in a succession of blind dates, he fled.

The New Forest was as far away from Glasgow as he felt he needed to be. Accepting the post was, he acknowledged, a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but it was what he wanted, some unchaperoned space to get back to his former self and the unobserved freedom to forge a life without Grace.

It was only after he had accepted the job that he realised that he should have taken into account his fear of horses. But, by then, it was too late.