A round-up of book signings, author interviews, news and events.
Returning from Kempton race course, Ken Hinde’s car, which he is driving alone, goes out of control and crashes, causing his death. The Coroner’s verdict is Accidental Death. Events after the accident make Valerie Elphick, Ken’s personal assistant, begin to doubt the verdict, and she begins her own investigation, starting in East London and finishing at the Cheltenham Festival.
Cupid’s War is the moving and inspiring true story of a war horse, one of many thousands that were shipped across the English Channel during the First World War to play their part on the Western Front. Cupid had been a father’s gift to his 15-year-old son, and when war broke out father, son and horse found themselves facing the horrors of the conflict together. They did not all return. Martin Laurie is the grandson of the young man who owned Cupid and rode her to war. With the aid of his grandfather’s letters and family documents and photographs, he has pieced together an astonishing story.
When actors and technicians from the Omega Film Company are abducted and held to ransom in Colombia by a merciless junta overlord, it falls to some familiar faces to stop a near tragedy. Mac is back. Ex-SAS captain Eli ‘Mac’ Murray and his wife, former Israeli Army Captain Sarah are plunged into an all-too-familiar world of murder, abduction and international plots. When Diego Contrero Moretta requests payment for the return of the captured film makers, Mac and Sarah become the captives’ only chance of making it out alive. Crisis in Colombia follows on from Bryan Marlowe’s thrilling novels Recalled to Arms and Leaving Mercy to Heaven in which the couple had to fight a fanatical terrorist group in Africa and the Middle East. Drawing on years of experience with the Royal Air Force, police, diplomatic service and as a newspaper columnist, the author weaves a new tale of international proportions in which Mac and Sarah find themselves battling both time and the unrelenting demands of Moretta to save the innocent abductees. Crisis in Colombia is an action-packed thriller featuring a deadly race across the globe against a determined captor with several tricks up his sleeve.
Country Ways is a story about the passage of time, from a Norman invasion to a narrowly-avoided German one. It tells of the joys and hardships of life in rural southern England through the seasons and through the centuries. It relates how a family coped with poverty and penury, and how a daughter became a millworker, a lady’s maid and eventually the author’s mother. The tale is set in and around the town of Chard in the West Country, although many of the events described could have taken place almost anywhere in England. The family in the spotlight, the Collins family, were in the main men of the soil and women who toiled at home. Some were miners, made shoes or clay pipes, or repaired machines for the two main local industries, weaving and butter making. Their lives, and the lives of the community around them in a rural England which is now largely forgotten, are brought vividly and touchingly to life through this well-studied and meticulously-documented tale. Country Ways is the first in a quartet of books by Terence Kearey dealing with aspects of life in Britain through the centuries from the perspective of his own family. The others are History, Heroism and Home, A Changing World and A Distance Travelled. The author is working on a screenplay based on the first three books and a definitive account of the Gommecourt Diversion discussed in History, Heroism and Home.
Our lessons for humanity are greater than our belief in today’s world of somatic luxury and amorphous dexterity with life’s journey. So, to speak the truth during a time brings many opinions and procrastination against the reality of God. The denial and projection of our modern age with excessive materialism is an unwanted message for humanity. So the proselytes with amplitude coercing with everyday reasoning has become one of modern-day thinking with God as a repellent. However, the reality and reasoning of our lives from one day to next becomes embroiled within a net of desire with materialism and we forget to SEE the real value of life. To reposition our personal projection and understanding with the beauty of belief and the adventurous journey through life is now sadly diminishing into a world of complete imbalance. God is indeed personal to every single person upon this Earth and this book brings the Elementary Epigraph and Epistemology regarding Bible Quotations and ordinary living within our lives of biology. However, it is the reader who will decide about the reality and reasoning of virtue and the message that this book portrays.
Timothy Leary’s famous exhortation in 1968 to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ has been blamed for persuading the masses to play with drugs, but the truth is that by the time of the ‘Summer of Love’ we had already been experimenting with them for thousands of years. Now chemist John Mann has responded to the continuing fascination with psychedelic, narcotic and euphoriant substances by setting out a fascinating and colourful history of their discovery and use. Chasms of Delight tells the story of mind-altering drugs over the centuries, from the poets and artists who produced their work under the influence of opium to the posturing of modern politicians, the iniquities of the international drug trade and the wild excesses of the 1960s and 70s.
Charlie Mace and the Big Stink takes place on Sniff Street, which was the dirtiest, scruffiest street in Bogsley, and Miss Potts’ house was the most disgusting and revolting of all the disgusting and revolting houses in it. She seemed to take delight in surrounding the place with rubbish, bottles of rancid milk and maggot-infested garbage. And why did one of her eyes stick out like a glassy golf ball? No wonder eleven-year-old Charlie Mace did his best to keep away from the place. But one day Charlie finds himself cornered by Miss Potts, and is roughly transported into a strange woodland world, a world in which he encounters a very odd collection of beings. They all seem to live in dread of The Stink, a dark, smelly and noisome creature which haunts the forest. Charlie does his best to help his new friends fight back – and then he discovers the shocking link between the Stink and Miss Potts….
Charlie Mace and the Big Stink is a vivid, colourful and compelling story for youngsters aged 10-14
Charlie Boy is the story of Charlie Carson: when his childhood dream of becoming an Olympic runner bites the dust, he turns all his attention to his other great talent – riding. As a hardworking farm boy with a passion for horses he discovers that he has all the skills he needs to serve on the front line as a despatch rider, just in time for the outbreak of World War One. Having lied about his age to enlist, Charlie soon finds that in the desperate strife of the trenches of the Somme, he needs all his skill and bravery, not only to survive but to play a vital part in his country’s victory.
Catacombs of the Dammed is the story of Bill and Alison Cavendish,They believe selling their London home and buying a decaying rural pile in the wilds of the English countryside is the perfect way to swap the stresses and strains of the city for a peaceful new life in the country, with the added bonus of cash in the bank. Unfortunately the manor house which captures their interest in the picturesque village of Little Daunting has problems far older, deeper and nastier than rats and dry rot. The cellars conceal a terrible, shocking secret; one which dates all the way back to the witch hunts of the 17th century and to those who would steal living bodies in the quest for eternal life. As Bill and Alison soon discover, at least one of the villagers knows far more than he is admitting about the gruesome events that have been taking place in the ancient, walled-off catacombs, which lie concealed under the neighboring churchyard. When Bill and Alison and their new gypsy allies investigate, they find themselves lifting the lid on an unimagined horror… Catacombs of the Dammed, is a sexy, shocking horror story for adults from P J Cadavori.
Carry On Ambulance is a collection of true stories of ambulance service antics from the 1960s to the present day. In the early 1960s, the main qualifications for acceptance into the ambulance service were the possession of a clean driving licence and a strong back. Tradesmen, mechanics, carpenters, car workers and ex-service personnel, after a minimal amount of training, could all assume the role of ambulance driver/attendant. That all stopped in 1965, when the Miller Report recommended that ambulance services should provide treatment as well as transport. I have compiled Carry On Ambulance of over 100 stories to pass down to posterity some of the extraordinary, bizarre and comical moments of the past 50-odd years. Many of these events happened before political correctness had been invented. In the interests of all concerned, the names and locations have been altered to protect the guilty. All the stories are true.