The Journeys Begin: Myrtle

From the glamour of Gilded Age New York to the wilds of the Texas frontier, follow one woman’s unexpected journey of faith and transformation.

Myrtle Crowly has always dreamed bigger than her quiet New Hampshire homestead. When she’s accepted into The Normal College in New York City, she’s thrilled to finally get her chance to become a teacher and experience the excitement of the Gilded Age city life.

But just as she’s settling into her new world, the unexpected happens. The Spirits, the same divine guidance that led her mother through the Civil War, intervene with a new direction: the pioneering wilderness in Texas.
Not the New York she craved all her childhood. Not the refined life she’s prepared for. But the raw, challenging frontier that will test everything she believes about herself and her dreams.

The Journeys Begin: Myrtle is the second book in the historical fiction series, The Journeys Begin, which follows five generations of women in a unique family through history as they embark on the strange family tradition, the Journey.

The Journeys Begin: Ora

A dangerous escape. A sixteen-year old’s spiritually guided journey. Choices that will change everything.

In 1864, the city of Atlanta surrenders to the Union Army, and sixteen-year old Ora Harding and her family prepare to leave everything behind, including their slaves. But an unexpected tragedy forces Ora and her little sister to flee on their own. Though they manage to escape, the journey ahead will demand more from Ora than she could ever imagine.

With only an unexplainable spiritual guidance pointing her towards New York, Ora must navigate a perilous path through a war-torn nation. As a Confederate heading into Northern territory, every mile brings new dangers. Every stranger could be friend or enemy. Every step tests not just her courage, but her heart.

Even in the darkest moments, Ora’s spiritual guide assures her she’s not truly alone, and that somewhere ahead, a new family and unexpected love await.

The Journeys Begin: Ora is the first book in the historical fiction series which follows five generations of women in a unique family through history as they embark on their strange family tradition, the Journey.

Training Mr. Right

She trains couples. He needs training. But who’s really learning the lesson?

Helen Young fixes broken relationships for a living while keeping men at arm’s length. As New York’s top relationships therapist, she’s seen every reason to stay single and her opinion of men is rock bottom.

Then a ranching couple from Wyoming calls her for help, and Helen prepares for another routine case. What she doesn’t expect is their son, Skip. Skip is rude, stubborn, and thinks she a pretentious city snob. He wants nothing more than for her to leave. Forced together on his family’s ranch, they clash constantly.

But beneath the big sky sunsets, something shifts. The tension changes. And Helen realises that Skip may be her biggest challenge yet. Can she train some manners into him, or will he teach her to open her heart?

Death at Hallowtide (Quill and Thornapple #1)

“What’s at the back of the field?” I asked. “Beyond the stream? Where the railing is?” Dermot turned to follow my pointing finger, and smiled. “That,” he said, “is your poison garden.”

Corrbofinn. A place where things are… different. Where Jessica Quill has inherited a house and land. And where she has just become the number one suspect in the murder of local wide boy Tony Millar.

Jessica’s life has entered uncharted waters. A job she hates, a cheating partner, her unexpected inheritance, and the final straw: tripping over a corpse in the rain when she comes to rural Ireland to arrange the sale of her property.

But Herne’s Acre is no ordinary place. It’s a key crossing-point on the borderlands between the mortal world and the otherworlds of the sidhe. And now it is to be sold by a stranger unfamiliar with the true nature of Corrbofinn, a source of considerable anxiety for Thornapple, that very civil servant of the Borderlands Commission.

Bewildered, grumpy, and armed only with knowledge of toxic plants and classic detective stories, Jessica pursues her own inquiries to clear her name. Corrbofinn yields some of its mysteries along with new friends—human, canine, and… Well. You know.

Increasingly conflicted, Jessica’s sensible self squares off against her dreams of a different life. But she makes enemies, too, leading to a deadly showdown on Hallowe’en, when the borders between worlds are at their most fluid and uncanny.

Hollowmen

“It seems to me—and I no longer claim objective recall—that the morning on which I first arrived in Quettopolis looked much like this morning just breaking. One year ago. I was right at least that it was my last job.”

The Moufet Institute’s mission is to protect endangered lepidoptera, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the ‘Players’ and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. Cuffe, recruited to create the rhetoric to underpin a new corporate vision, finds her initial confidence eroded by the grotesqueries of the Institute and its environment—the punitive process with its absent defendant, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry, the quarterly Hunt, the Forest as it re-asserts itself.

Then the Institute is galvanised by the discovery of a breeding pair of a rare moth species in a country in the throes of a military coup. The Institute in turn is riven by competing ambitions—the scientific specialists trying to save the moths, the Players trying to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement…

Hollowmen is an intricate and unsettling work, its shifting, interleaved narratives by turns ironic, lyrical, witty, and savage.

Fluctuation in Disorder

An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of despairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways.

In these ten finely crafted and unsettling stories, Maxwell’s slipstream style interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from the world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent.

More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links—environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions can corrupt or sacrifice those within them; the interpretations and recording of past events by unreliable narrators; and the pervasive, irreducible weirdness of existence.

And the WIldness (Flux Avellana #1)

“So the actual reason I was calling you is because—get this—I am not going to Prague this summer at all. Surprise! Thanks, Villa. Just ruin my life for me.”

Villa Grace is in disgrace. Her expulsion from school has ruined the prospect of a family holiday in imperial Prague, where her mother is organising a conference. Two of her three siblings are barely speaking to her, as all four face into a ‘holiday’ sweltering on Cobwell Farm in the back of beyond of drought-stricken Hibernia.

But the power-hungry St. Maur Ker family has breached the border between mortal and sídh for their own gain. Cobwell, on the threshold of myth, is about to become the centre of a battle between older, wilder forces and the technomantic ambitions of one of the empire’s great aristo–corporate clans.

Caught up in this conflict, the children are forced to face up to the dark underbelly of their parents’ corporate environment, and to confront their own conflicting ambitions and loyalties.

Good Red Herring (Muinbeo Chronicles #1)

“Some of these stories really started decades, generations, ago, and now come to their close. New things begin to arise from the past, like phoenix feathers separating from the flame. The winding down of the old stories and the starting of the new arose from a death; a murder, if you will believe such wickedness. We warn you. We are the last—eh—people to pretend that Muinbeo is some kind of Island of the Blessed.”

Those enigmatic entities, the Storytellers of Muinbeo, know that History has something waiting in the wings. To set the scene for their audience, they relate a gripping tale about a death and its consequences.

When her mentor is bitten by a rogue werewolf and “joins our hairy brethren howling at the moon,” apprentice detective Salmon Farsade is assigned to Hal McCabe, Detective Chief-Inspector and vampire, just in time for a murder.

Fen Maguire has been stabbed, throwing the normally peaceful community of Ballinpooka into shock. The investigation into her death lifts the lid on more than just the name of her killer: political corruption, Outland conspiracy, academic deceit, and plain old-fashioned greed. A second murder follows: the clock is ticking, and as they seek a key to unlock the truth, the detectives are both helped and hindered by the various human and not-so-human beings that populate Muinbeo.

A Wild Goose Hunt (Muinbeo Chronicles #2)

“You did not tell the Abbess a single lie,” Diamond said, “but you didn’t tell her the truth.”

As a good Sombrist, Hunter Sessaire is aware that not only lying, but also curiosity, is very much frowned upon by his community. As an apprentice archivist, he cannot resist the temptation to try to puzzle out how a manuscript could have been stolen from the room within the Sombrists’ stronghold known as the Labyrinth. A room that opens only during a planetary alignment. An alignment that has not yet taken place.

But this is not the only enigma abroad in Muinbeo this winter. Seemingly disparate occurrences remain opaque even to those normally in the know, such as Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe, scratching his head over the inexplicable vanishing of his apprentice, Salmon Farsade, and the dramatic and destructive theft of an ancient silver hand from the local school museum.

The boundaries of Muinbeo, carefully managed to keep the Outland and its machinations by and large outside where they belong, have become a bit more porous than McCabe would like, not least when he begins to suspect that some of the uncanny events may have their roots in a controversial Outland archaeological dig in Aegypt… Once again we are led into a maze of mystery by those not entirely reliable narrators, the Storytellers, in this enthralling sequel to Good Red Herring.

If Our Crops Fail, We Fail – Farming, Climate Change and how you can make a difference

In spite of all the technology of the modern world, we live in societies that are still fundamentally agrarian. If climate change makes agriculture all but impossible in large areas of the world there is a widespread risk of famine and solely relying on international trade to cover any shortfalls is unlikely to be a sound strategy to resolve this. Active engagement with the issue across society will be required to help mitigate the effects.

If Our Crops Fail, We Fail – Farming, Climate Change and how you can make a difference outlines what the nature of the issues facing agriculture from climate change are, which potential solutions are likely to have merit and practical steps we can take as individuals, communities and nations to help address the issue.