Wednesday 29 April 2015

WIN the first book in the Crime Files series, Hell to Pay



Did someone say FREE book?

Hell, yeah.

Enter to win the first book in the Crime Files series, Hell to Pay by Jenny Thomson now. Just click HERE 

Here’s a wee taster –

Nancy Kerr refuses to be a victim—even when she walks in on her parents’ killers and is raped and left for dead…

Fourteen months later, Nancy wakes up in a psychiatric hospital with no knowledge of how she got there.

Slowly, her memory starts to return.

Released from the institution, she has just one thing on her mind—two men brought hell to her family home.

Now they’re in for some hell of their own…



Now available on Amazon –

USA 





Categories: Mystery/Thriller, Pre-Orders. Tags: Crime, Crime Files, Criminal Supense, Detective, Hell To Pay, Jenny Thomson, Murder, Mystery, Revenge, Suspense, Thriller.



Thursday 23 April 2015

This week I needed Liam Neeson


I bet he'd find the phone

"What kind of week have I had?"


The kind that makes you shove in your earphones and play Karma Police so loud, you’re not just listening to it: it’s in your head.  


The kind where you set up a page to talk about your bullying book and folk come onto it and wait for it, start bullying one another. Yeah, really. Couldn’t believe it either.


The kind where you think your downstairs neighbour has opened a brewery because it sounds like he’s been tossing beer barrels about his floor for the past few days.


The kind of week where you despair of human nature because your OH dropped his mobile phone and someone picked it up and pocketed it. We don’t have much but what we do have we’ve worked damned hard for.


Note to the ass wipe who kept it - what you’re meant to do when you find someone’s phone, is ring up one of the numbers and find out who belongs to and return it. At least if you want to belong to the human race. You clearly don’t. Karma police are gonna get you, mate.


Just realised that instead of venting my spleen here, I should have left a Liam Neeson Taken-style message on the phone –


‘I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.


Obviously, the ‘kill’ in this case means in my novel and not real life.


Only two things have made my life bearable this week –


A wee dog who loves me unconditionally and always wants to play.

Happy as a sand dog (on second thoughts, he looks worried)


Football (that’s soccer to my pals in the good ol’ USA). Non-football fans don’t get it, but there’s a reason this sport is called, the beautiful game.


Few things make you happier when things go right. You see a cracker of a goal. Some brilliant play. Your team (in my case Dundee United) lift that elusive trophy. And, here’s the best thing of all – you get to bawl and shout and it gets your frustrations out. And nothing beats the times when everyone in the crowd is cheering as one, and making something happen on the pitch. The atmosphere is electric and it’s as if you’re riding along on a wave.


But more on that later. I’m now off to hone my CIA skills. ‘I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want…’

Friday 17 April 2015

Guest Bloggers required



I’m doing a release day promo for the first book in my Crime Files series, Hell To Pay and I’m looking for fellow authors and bloggers to post on the day the book is released – April 28th. Is that something you think you can do?

I could either send you something of your choice or there’s a release day blog post, please sign up here. 

If you sign up there, html will be provided for quick and easy post by the PR company I’m using. I know, I’ve gone all Hollywood, mainly because my head isn’t really in the game. My dad recently passed away and after a long battle with cancer (he was brought home to die and I helped to look after him) and I only got back from looking after my mum a few days ago (my dad's funeral was on April 1st, which would have appealed to his sense of humor).

I’d really appreciate it if you could do a blog post.



Order links for Hell to Pay (Crime Files Book 1) on Kindle

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.ca

Amazon.com.au

****Coming soon in paperback***

Books 2 and 3 coming out on May 12th and May 26th.





Thursday 16 April 2015

5 Common novel writing mistakes

This is how I am when I write a novel:)


Writing a novel is hard enough. Writing one that will not only get published, but also sell is harder still.

But, what if you're writing your novel and you think something's missing? Could you be making one of these common mistakes?

1. Writing what you think will sell and not what you want to write - We all want to have a bestseller; to write the book everybody is talking about. But we won't do that if we don't write from the heart, because if we don't enjoy writing our books; if we don't put our heart and soul into our writing, who on earth is going to enjoy reading them?

2. Writing too much back story - Writers need to think like the readers they are and what can be worse than wading through heaps of backstory to get to the real story? You've read 30 pages of a novel and you know every intimate detail of the main character's life but guess what - the story hasn't started yet or its been dragged down by all that mind numbing backstory.

Tip - A little back story is fine, but generally back story should come out in dribs and drabs in the course of telling your story. Not as an avalanche.

3. Using the wrong point of view - Are you telling your story from the right POV? Is first person too restrictive (you can only tell the story through your narrator's eyes) or is third person not intimate enough?

Changing POV can work wonders.

4. Starting the story too late or too early - Every story should begin when something has actually happened or is about to happen. You need to hook the reader from the start, not expect them to skim read through a third of the book before they get to the good part. They won't. They'll put your book down. They won't buy the next.



One of the best books for writing tips.

5. Being too predictable - Have you ever read a book and thought "I feel like I've read this before" when you know you haven't? Why not follow a tip from Stephen King's On Writing and think "what's the most logical thing that should happen next?" then write the opposite.

Thursday 9 April 2015

Isn't it about time women got justice in life and fiction?



Someone I know very well and care about very deeply, was walking to her car in broad daylight just as she'd done so many times before. She'd just put in a 12 hour shift at the hospital where she works as a nursing assistant and was so tired she'd trouble putting one foot in front of the other. She was desperate to get home because her cat hadn't come back the night before and she was worried about him.

She was about 5 steps away from her car when she heard a voice.

"Lady, I think you dropped something."

She didn't think she had, but turned around anyway.

When the fist pummelled into her face she fell and hit her head on the pavement. Too dazed to get up, she could do nothing as the man dragged her into bushes. She was raped and beaten so badly even her own mother didn't recognise her.

She'd scratched her attacker, so she had his blood under her fingernails, but there was a mix up at the forensics lab and the only sample they had got lost. The police made an arrest, but they let the man go because his lawyer argued that her identification of him wouldn't stand up in court because she'd been concussed when she’d fell.

Cathy (not her real name) is not alone in not getting justice.

In the UK, the prosecution rate for rapists is pathetically low. According to official figures in the UK for 2012, only one in 30 victims (the majority of them women) can expect to see their attacker brought to justice. In 2010, Jane Clough was murdered by former boyfriend Jonathon Vass who'd been released on bail whilst awaiting trial for raping her several times.

In the USA, it's more difficult to determine, but it wouldn’t surprise me if most women who are raped don’t get to see their attacker convicted.

 Hell To Pay


I wrote Hell To Pay because I wanted to see an everyday woman turn the table on her attackers after the law failed her. I was sick of seeing strong, brave women like my friend subjected to the vilest of assaults and left with victim's guilt. Cathy once said to me that the police asked her why she didn't ask a male colleague to walk her to her car. The question upset her. She felt as though they were blaming her for being attacked.

In time, she started to think they were right.

In my friend's case she never got justice. She never saw the man (if anything that can be called a man could do such cruel things aimed at achieving the maximum hurt and degradation to another human being) in the dock and never got to tell her story to a court.

The Crime Files books come with a guarantee: that women will always get justice and the bad guys will be punished. Maybe, just maybe, one day that will happen in real life.
Note - this piece first appeared at http://diehardforgirls.weebly.com/1/post/2013/07/isnt-it-about-time-women-got-justice.html

Disclaimer: the Crime Files books are pure, escapist fiction and do not in any way advocate violence.


Order links for Hell to Pay (Crime Files Book 1) on Kindle

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.ca

Amazon.com.au

****Coming soon in paperback***

Books 2 and 3 are also available. 

Book 2 










Monday 6 April 2015

Why is it when women get revenge they're called man-hating bitches, men are called heroes?

Picture

We need more strong women like The Walking Dead's Michonne and Carol in fiction.

I wrote Hell To Pay because I was sick of the way women are portrayed in
fiction. Whilst TV shows like The Walking Dead (has there ever been a more kick
ass woman in a TV show as Michonne) and Person of Interest (hey, we're spoilt
with three strong women in one show) have cottoned onto the fact that women are
just as likely to punch a mugger as hand over their handbag, fiction seems to be
trailing behind with far too few exceptions like the excellent Detective DD
Warren 
series by Lisa Gardner and Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoloi and Isles.


In Hell to Pay, office worker Nancy Kerr comes home to find her parents
tortured and murdered. The culprits, two men repeatedly rape her and leave her
to bleed to death on the floor after they've repeatedly stabbed her. Nancy has a
breakdown and when she recovers she has just one goal - to get revenge on the
men who ruined her life.

The response I've had has fallen into two camps -
the overwhelmingly positive with people saying it's about time women got
revenge just like men (and many of the readers saying that have been men) and
the ones who dismiss Nancy as a man hating bitch.

The second opinion surprises me and after spending time thinking about why a woman who goes after her parents killers and the men who raped her and left her for dead, should be described as "man hating," I've come to the conclusion that women just aren't meant to get their revenge.

Nope, they're meant to turn the other cheek and forgive their attackers and just move on with their lives. They're certainly not allowed to use violence. 

I've interviewed women who've survived rape and the one thing that seems common to
 them all is the guilt they feel. When they were attacked, they were powerless. There was nothing they could do, yet they blamed themselves. They believed there was something they could have done; they should have fought more. For some of them that feeling was so intense that they took their own lives or became terrified to go
out. 

Out on April 28th


That's why I wrote revenge thriller Hell To Pay, the first in a series of books I've
called the Crime Files. I wanted to have some escapist fiction where a woman
does get her own revenge, because let's be honest here, the conviction rates for
rape are pitiful.

Why don't you read Hell To Pay and tell me whether Nancy Kerr is really a "man-hating bitch" or an avenging warrior?

I'd be interested to know what people think.

You can read an excerpt here

Order links for Hell to Pay (Crime Files Book 1) on Kindle

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.ca

Amazon.com.au

****Coming soon in paperback***

Books 2 and 3 coming out on May 12th and May 26th.






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