Ghostwriter Confidential: a selection of newspaper cuttings

In a career spanning more than three decades, journalist Geraldine Comiskey wrote for a wide range of newspapers in her native Ireland, the UK and US, breaking exclusives and writing on all aspects of human life. This is a selection of her cuttings. They include articles on crime, cults, murder-suicides, mental health, justice, business, the economy, farming, animal rights and environmental matters as well as features on the lighter side of life.
They include an interview with a district court judge, a sheriff, a woman who escaped from a mental health institution, an animal psychic, and families affected by murder, murder-suicide and rape. They include articles on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, a first-hand account of life on a Greenpeace ship and an investigation into the use of animals to test cosmetics.
Note: All of these articles are freely available online; the purpose of this book is to showcase her journalism to potential future employers / clients of her ghostwriting service. They don’t include the stories from her books in the Wacky series which are available as separate books.

Skin Deep: Beauty is only skin-deep…until everybody has it

Skin Deep – synopsisBeauty is only skin deep…until everybody has it.

Cosmetic surgeon Raffaella Bianchi has grown up knowing that she is the most beautiful girl in the Italian town of Borgocasino. But she has never been tempted to sashay down the Milan passarella or join the hordes of starlets who fight tooth-and-manicured-fingernail for jobs as TV gameshow hostesses.

Having experienced emotional pain as an adolescent, she wants to help other people – whether with a comforting smile or a sharp scalpel. And she believes that the only cure for some people is…beauty. So she offers her services free.  Actors, women taken for granted by their boyfriends, gangsters on the run…they all come to the beautiful “Dottoressa” to heal their self-image and change their lives.

Soon, beauty is no longer the preserve of those with good genes or plenty of money. The runways are inundated with uber-models. Hollywood has so many stars that even the extras are extra-glam. Beauty loses its exclusive appeal – and ugliness becomes a precious commodity. Now everyone wants to see unattractive people on screen, on the catwalk, sitting across the table from them on Valentine’s Night. What’s the point in a candlelit dinner when the two of you look gorgeous in floodlights? What’s the point in putting the spotlight on the belle of the ball, when everyone is bellissima?

But Raffaella’s act of altruism has gone horribly wrong, and she has made enemies, including the mother of a child beauty pageant princess, a jealous husband whose wife has become very desirable to other men – and a crazed dog-breeder who seeks revenge after Raffaella refuses to make her pug more ‘pugly’.

Still Life: she wants to paint a new life

She wants to paint a new life for herself, but can she turn it into a masterpiece? Beautiful, spoilt Chloe is a flower of a girl – and a thorn in the side of every socialite in the affluent Dublin suburb of Belgowan. Her parents got rich just in time for her to jump the queue in the pecking order of pampered princesses. She simply refuses to accept her place according to the rules of suburban snobbery – and, at nineteen, being the belle of Belgowan is only a starting point for a fairytale life full of endless possibilities…

But suddenly the red carpet is whipped from under her – when her doting Daddy leaves her mother for a floozy and goes off to sip bubbly on the tax-haven island of Santa Moneta.

Through the gossip pages of the national press, Chloe realises that it’s not a bad dream: she really has got a Wicked Stepmother, a half-brother who’s going through the Terrible Twos – and no pocket money. Dear old Daddy has turned into a champagne cheapskate whose business has mysteriously gone bust, and he’s no longer willing to support Chloe, her wannabe rock star kid brother Daryus (who copes with losing his father by moving in with a lapdancer) and their shopaholic mother (who’s not coping at all).

Chloe spends every lunch break gazing at the masterpieces in the National Gallery. Inspired by their complex beauty, she paints a colourful new life for herself.

But there’s a rip in her canvas: a charming and ambitious young man, and his glamorous wife. Chloe doesn’t want to have anything to do with broken marriages– and she never takes hand-me-downs.

The Drop-Out: freedom has a prize

Providence Wilde is not the kind of girl you’d expect to see living rough on the streets of Dublin.

After all, not many homeless people get to sleep on the sofa in the VIP lounge of Dublin’s hippest nightclub, maintain their gym membership and go on dates in posh restaurants.

Alienated from her family, she discovers that friends are not forever and “freedom” has a price.

* With extracts from “Floozies” and “Skin Deep”, by the same author.

Wacky Ireland: a romp through the Irish countryside

(Updated version of “Wacky Eire”)

Imagine BBC’s Countryfile crossed with Channel 4’s cult series Eurotrash – and Father Ted!Now imagine it as a book of true stories, from scandalous exposés to charming vignettes of rural life, told by an insider who has travelled the length and breadth of Ireland seeking out the weird, the wacky, the naughty-but-nice and the downright shocking – an outrageous romp through the Emerald Isle, where ancient traditions, strange customs and modern obsessions make lively bedfellows and where people constantly surprise you. Farmers, faith-healers, lovesick bachelors, animal antics, ghosts – this is modern Ireland.You won’t find these stories in the tourism brochures, and this book is not for the easily offended, the ultra-conservative or anyone po-faced. But if you’ve ever drawn a moustache on your local politician’s poster, or a willy on the John Hinde postcard donkey, this is the perfect book for your coffee-table, the ideal gift for a foreign visitor – and a poignant memento for an émigré.Welcome to Wacky Ireland – it’s stranger than fiction.NEW updated edition includes a list of little-known Holy shrines…chapters on the ancient Fair at Maam Cross, the Goddess Fest at the Gates of Hell, Donald Trump, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary… more about Loftus Hall, spooks in general, feisty farmers, monster plants, Obama, Elvis, Joe Dolan and the mystery of the Boleyn sisters…an explanation of gaelic terms – and a countryman’s guide to “culcher”.

Chasing Casanova

Imagine Love Island set in a small Italian town with a bunch of middle-aged misfits…
It’s 2000 and there’s no such thing as Tinder, so Esmerelda Fox goes looking for love in the country that invented Casanova.
At 34, she’s dated more duds than studs in her native Ireland – and she just wants some uncomplicated amore.
But nothing is ever simple in the land of opera, fashion and the Mafia. Before she can say “Buonasera”, she’s got a slutty reputation, a toxic boss and a set of colleagues every bit as eccentric as her UFO-spotting ,Elvis-impersonating family.

Soon, everyone is hunting Fox.

Floozies: femmes fatales are fighting back

Femmes fatales are fighting back. It’s not easy being the only dysfunctional member of a well-balanced family – especially when you’re a forty-year-old social pariah with a ‘princess complex’ and a reputation for ‘borrowing’ other women’s men. Vain and catty, Frida Carey has always been proud to be what every woman loves to hate and what every man is ashamed to know: a floozy. Now she’s losing her looks – and, with them, the allure that used to make her irresistible to Mr Wrong.And she’s not the only one. Ignored in public by their married lovers, bullied out of jobs by ‘envious’ female colleagues, shunned at weddings and Christenings, mocked by women’s magazines, sabotaged by love rivals, floozies are forever under attack.But they’re not going to take it lying down. No longer content to be garden-fence gossip-fodder, watercooler scandal or some married man’s dirty little secret, Frida and her friends decide to set up a political party to fight for the rights of loose women everywhere.Armed with killer fingernails, mascara and five-inch heels, the Floozy Party is ready to declare war on respectability.But even a bad reputation has to conform to certain rules, and Frida finds it’s not easy being a high-profile low-life.

Shampoo & Sympathy: A story about gossip, split ends…and murder

No one goes to the hairdresser’s just for a haircut. As everyone knows, a hairdresser is a combination of psychiatrist, confidante…and confessor.

Kay and Shay Sheeran’s trendy salon, Ugly, has got the usual clientele of gossips and scandalmongers, with one exception. Because of its location in Dublin’s poshest suburb, it attracts more than a fair share of “VIP”s.

The beautiful, the successful and the scandalous…all queue up to have their hair styled and spill the beans…. Long before the tabloids have got the news, Kay knows whose husband has run off with a visiting Hollywood actress and Shay has enough information to topple the Government.

The young couple stick conscientiously to the hairdressers’ code of conduct: they never reveal clients’ secrets. That usually means not telling a gossip columnist whether an actress is a natural blonde or not…or which famous rock star popped in for a change of image.

But when a bestselling author tells them that he has murdered his philandering wife, Kay and Shay are put in a dilemma. Should they break the confidential bond between hairdresser and client and tell the police? Should they tell an equally famous celebrity journalist who also happens to be one of their clients? Or should they keep quiet, pretend they never heard it and continue building their reputations as Dublin’s most prestigious stylists?

As they are drawn deeper into the writer’s real-life plot, Kay and Shay find themselves dealing with a grey area that they can’t cover over.

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unRIP

The last critic to drive a knife into Karina Stark gave her the fame she craved – and she’s not ready to RIP!

When a pseudo-goth popstar and animal rights activist is found viciously murdered, she becomes a cult icon – and her mother a monster. For Karina Stark left a diary in which she accused Gloria of being ‘the Mum from Hell’. Envious of her daughter’s growing success, bitter about her own broken dreams, Gloria wanted Karina dead – or so the girl claimed.

As her morbid young fans turn to Witchtok, the real Karina emerges, wreaking havoc from beyond the grave.

* Aneeta Hall is a pseudonym for the journalist Geraldine Comiskey

* The screenplay for a TV series pilot based on the book has won several awards

Battle of the Birds by Korg the Crow

Korg is the bossiest bird in his community. Respected by ravens, rooks, jackdaws, magpies and his own flock of grey crows, he enjoys being King of the Corvids.

But Korg has enemies: cats, birdwatchers – and a flock of marauding seagulls.

In an action-packed summer, Korg protects his patch, makes friends with the songbirds – and becomes a rock star!

Now Korg is telling his story*

*(with the help of his human ghostwriter, Geraldine Comiskey)