LIZ FIELDING

JOYE...

PAM...

Are you out there? Can you hear me?

You both won books on the guest Rita blogs but we can't send them to you if you don't email me with your names and addresses (there's an email link on my website)

Okay, I've stopped shouting now...

I'm sorry I've been neglecting my own blogging over the last couple of weeks. It's not that I don't have news. I do. My daughter survived the examination system and despite holding down a really responsible job with long hours, she now has her Masters. She was coming to Wales for the wedding of an old school friend (who now lives in Louisiana) but didn't get further than Paddington Station because all the trains were cancelled due to flooding. (Doesn't you heart go out to those people? And there seems to be no let up with the weather.) When, hugely disappointed, she battled her way home (one train running from Victoria), she found that news waiting for her. I am sooo proud!

I've had some totally fabulous reviews in for REUNITED: MARRIAGE IN A MILLION, which is out next week, or available online now. This is a five star job from Cataromance:

Liz Fielding kicks off the new Secrets We Keep trilogy with Reunited: Marriage in a Million, a powerful romance written straight from the heart that is brimming with emotional intensity and compelling drama.

Go here to read more.

I've just read the second book in the trilogy, NEEDED: HER MR RIGHT and I'm here to tell you that Barbara Hannay has written a moving and wonderfully sexy romance that I just loved. And it made me cry... always a plus!

And I'm finally making headway with the novella I'm writing. Do you want a taster? Do you? Really? Oh, go on then...

‘What have we got here?’

The “expert”, a silver-haired smoothie and darling of the blue-rinse brigade, was familiar from the many evenings she’d sat watching this programme with her grandmother.

'I don’t know,’ she said, truthfully, putting the brown padded envelope she had been clutching to her chest on the baize covered table in front of him. ‘To be honest I feel a bit of a fool bringing it here --’ ... she felt better for getting that out ... ‘-- but my neighbour lived in the Middle East for a while and she thought it was interesting.’

Oh, lame, Violet Hamilton. Pathetic to blame someone not here to defend herself.


‘Well, let’s have a look at it shall we?’ He tipped a rag-wrapped bundle out onto the table in front of him.

‘That’s just how I found it,’ Violet said, quickly, not wanting him to think she routinely kept her valuables wrapped in rotted black silk. Not that she had any valuables. ‘This morning,’ she added. ‘When I put my foot through the floorboards.’ The cameraman pointed his lens at her strapped up ankle.

Terrific... This was her “fifteen minutes of fame” and already her ankle was more interesting. ‘It must have been there for years,’ she said.

Without a word he carefully unfolded the rotted silk to reveal an ornately decorated dagger. Around them people crowded in to get a closer look.

That it was old was not in doubt. The handle had the patina of hard-use and, inset in the top was a large, smoothly polished red stone the size of a pigeon’s egg. The sheath wasn’t straight, but sharply curved and adorned with fancy filigree work into which were set three similar, tear-shaped red stones, decreasing in size as they reached the curved point and looking for all the world as if the stone on the handle was bleeding along its length.

The man said nothing for so long that Violet said, ‘If I’d seen it on a market stall, I’d had sworn it was some fanciful pantomime prop. Something the genie might wear in Aladdin.’ The crowd, obligingly, laughed. ‘All glass and plastic,’ she added.

Then, as he eased the knife out of the sheath and the lights glinted off the metal, the laughter died.

‘It’s not a theatrical prop,’ he said, unnecessarily.

Stay tuned for the winner of Elizabeth Oldfield's book.