Molly Cutpurse

Miriam's Golden Years takes us from 1963 until the nineteen nineties. A period when she bore the many deaths of her family and friends with dignity, but is more than pleased to welcome the beginning of her grandchildren, great grandchildren and great nephews and nieces, despite all their singular problems. Equally remarkable, as the rest of her life had been, Miriam finds herself wrestling with the problems of social and political violence, the rise of female emancipation, decimalisation and the acceptance of becoming elderly while still caring deeply for her extended family and her beloved husband, Roy. She has now gone beyond a matriarchal figure. She is host to memories long forgotten, a contributor to a decent way of life fast disappearing and part of a proud East End dynasty that her descendants will never forget.

The Angel of Death is a bleak and fictional account of the United Kingdom's prison system.When terrorists commit an act of genocide resulting in the deaths of over eleven thousand Londoners, the Prime Minister, under pressure of intense social media, announces a new government initiative as the death penalty is no longer practicable.The new legislation called, the Safe Limitation Act is rushed through Parliament and a woman neurosurgeon is employed to run the scheme. But however successful the program, she is eventually betrayed by the government, rejected by her family and spurned by her friends, undergoing the most consequential counteraction by the population in living memory.

Lara Everett is a sensitive, childless widow of twenty years. She is settled, has buried her childhood dreams, is financially solvent and addicted to being alone. She would not call herself depressed, just unhappy. However, in her forty-third year, fate allows William (Bill) Lee, a shrewd and resourceful man, a man entirely unsuitable for any woman, to cross her threshold and take hold of her heart. Hypnotised by his sheer physical presence, Lara has no choice but to take the hardest path and realise that it is not the superficial fleshly oddities that are important but something far more formidable and ultimately satisfying. Set in 1969 and with memories going back to World War Two, The Bitter Rose and the Thorn is a narrative account of a woman choosing to abandon her catastrophic past and move towards a more self-fulfilling life.

In the eighth and final novel describing the Morrow family of Newgate Street, we find them twenty-one years later during 1966. The business is now being managed by Maggie and Anthony who do not have a great deal of hope for its long-term future due to the changing requirements of Londoners, many of whom are daily commuters and not members of local families who had lived in the area for generations. Maud and Richard are now in their seventies and retired. They live above the hardware store but still show a keen interest in it, as well as their family and friends. Therefore, the elderly couple find living in the modern world difficult because not only are they surrounded by powerful memories but find it increasingly difficult to accept the contemporary concepts that the youth enjoy. With every passing year they know the world that offered them the best years of their life is fast disappearing as their deep affection for each other increases.

n this year Maud and her family learn that the physical horrors and disappointment of living through a world war extend beyond mere death. For despondency and demoralising events happen closer to home as her children change in ways she previously could not have imagined. Would these occurrences have happened had the Germans not begun their quest for world domination? Just how long would it take to win the war as she and everybody else ask how many more needless deaths of soldiers, Jews, intellectuals, gypsies, ordinary civilians and the Nazis, so-called, undesirables would have to die? As the Morrow family s tired and weary souls prevail under the gravest of situations, Maud and her husband, Richard find the question impossible to answer. Yet, as they endure, bright speckles of happiness and even love and new life occasionally whirl around them making their lives just bearable.

Alien Queens 4 poses yet another problem for Stewart, Frankie, Anne B and Velvet's narrator, Miss (now Mrs) Molly Flaguline. For the escapade in which they find themselves, perplexes even the mature understanding of their original eighteenth century lady-of-the-night turned archivist. As if the notion of time travel wasn't difficult enough for Molly to comprehend, her knotty problem is how to document what happened when Velvet decides she wants to rescue her long lost sister, Vibeta from a thousand years ago. Alternate universes, doppelgangers, multiple timelines and worst of all, Qartin; an earth-like parallel world where royal cannibalistic humans pray to the half-blind goddess, Vampas are only a few instances that poor Molly has to chronicle in the correct order. Alien Queens 4 contains distasteful confusion, abhorrent blood sacrifices, Stewart and Frankie's diminishing love for each other and an insane deranged princess.

The last year of a lower class London family and friends living and working in Newgate Street before war engulfs them. There are funerals, affairs, deception, violence, and even a murder. And to those familiar with the Miriam series, there is a surprising visitor. A novel with domineering mothers, obsessions with famous trials and hangings and frustration that the little corporal from Germany was going to take over their lives. Yet amongst the anger and heartache of their everyday existence, many of their frustrations arrive from realising that they are subject to an unknowable future...

Miriam is now eighty-seven and after Roy's death, still lives in the large vicarage in Wanstead with Rafa alongside Rafa, Florence and her twin girls, Faith and Betty. It is now a time of reflection, the promise of a great, great grandchild, and long conversations about the events and conditions that shaped her life. Yet even as her body moves inexorably into extreme old age, events continue around her that proves that even wheelchair bound, her clear and sound mind, alongside her remarkable memory, can still dispense positive advice and be more than useful to those who are charged with caring for her. Miriam's Last Year also sees Rafa Barker in her twilight years when she too has become alone once more, abandoned by her one and only daughter over a shameful event from which she cannot face. A time when, surrounded by her close family and friend, she too takes a reflective sad look back on a lifetime of service and love as she cares for Miriam during her final days.

A fantasy grounded in reality. In 1963 when Miss Donna Lawson discovers an unconscious woman on a deserted stairwell at London's Fenchurch Street Station, she calls for help immediately, little realizing that the bizarrely dressed lady wearing late Victorian clothes is about to offer her an experience that will change her perception on life and love. That is if she can shake off the suspicion that she has become the central figure in what could be an elaborate hoax. Her reservations are not made any easier by the sordid and hidden activities of her boyfriend, but at least are eased by the appearance of one good man.

On a warm and late summer evening in 2015, after her boyfriend dumps her, Essex girl, Donna Rigg drunkenly smashes her car into a pillar box. She is taken to hospital where she is diagnosed with concussion. Over the next few weeks, her perception changes, for she begins to see the world as it was fifty-five years previously in 1960. On a follow-up visit for an MRI, she becomes frightened and argues with staff. Becoming aggressive and overhearing she could be sectioned, she runs from the hospital and vanishes in the grounds as 1960 actually becomes her reality...Misplaced was written (optimistically) as literary fiction and as a first person narration. It is focused more on theme than on plot. As Donna describes her adventure, it certainly risks losing its way with no simplistic logical ending.

Holloway, House of Correction is an alternative fantasy and documents the unlikely friendship between two women; Victoria, wealthy, beautiful and recently married, and the impoverished Margaret, the only surviving daughter of Victorian England's most prolific serial murderer, Mary Ann Cotton. Both live close to the old Holloway Gaol when it became a women's only prison in the spring of 1902.

The future: The ability to map the human cortex neurone by neurone has been perfected by way of scanning. While people live, it is now possible to place a copy of a person's personality into data storage. A Similarity. The main reason is so the bereaved can communicate with them after death. Geolog is a world leader in this technology. For two middle-aged sisters, Mia and Emma, living on an isolated farm on the periphery of Hastings, this technology divides them. When Mia's husband is murdered in Hong Kong and she uses his Similarity online, a family secret is revealed forcing them to ask some profound questions about life and the continuance of the human soul. And all the time, Geolog, the technology giant, is monitoring them.

A four part novel set in Clifton Buildings, Carter Lane near St Paul's cathedral. The landlord is a miserly and deliberately cruel money lender called, Mr Scrooge. Mr and Mrs Percy Radcliffe are an impoverished, newly married couple struggling to run a funeral business in 1843. Their descendants run the same business in 1892, and during the December blitz of 1940 as well. And finally there are eight people living their solitary lives in 2009 in converted flats. On their Christmas days, over the centuries, what have these people in common? Is their good fortune because they happen to live in the same house, or is there a more spiritual and indefinable reason? Have their Christmas experiences anything to do with what happened to the old money lender one Christmas morning all those years ago?

A Faerie Tale for adults. Risteard Pheoden is a young man of limited wisdom who lives in the port city of King's Scallion on the coastline of the Vihq Ocean, which lays within the Trallaedel Kingdom. His life is uneventful until he meets, Dane Haddix, a transvestite and sexual predator who shows him that, 'there is no cure for pleasure'. Through Dane though, Risteard meets and marries the spirited and vivacious sorceress and psychic, Miss Si saidh Molde who is truly to change the rest of his life. Yet Risteard cannot rise above his past, and when Lort, an older, passive and sadomasochistic man insinuates himself into their everyday lives, nothing will ever be the same again.

When Peter met April in the summer of 1946, his family speculated it was a match made in heaven. Therefore, when the couple married in 1953, Miriam Barker hoped that her son would keep their large family together in Stratford. But the circumstances and excitement of the mid Nineteen Fifties overran the significance of his pedigree and, to his mother's dismay, Peter, a newly qualified policeman, bought a flat in Barkingside, historically part of Essex. Here they would meet a variety of characters quite different from the ones they had known during their time in East London. Close friends, private confrontations, a death or two, secrets and pregnancy; these became subjects that were part of any newly married couple setting up in a new home. But seventeen years later, April's very existence is threatened... Peter and April is the ninth book in the successful series about the life of the Miriam Barker family, mainly concentrating on Miriam herself

Harry Whittle is a sixteen year old son of an emotionally frustrated butler working in London. He fails in his attempt to join the army in 1916 because of his age. As a punishment for his recklessness, Harry is sent to work on a wealthy estate in Devon where he befriends the owner's sixteen year old daughter, Blanche who is slightly deranged due to her younger brothers abruptly disappearing five years previously. While walking in the woods, miserable and homesick, Harry and Blanche are unaccountably and instantaneously catapulted into the unsolved misadventure of what happened to Blanche's brothers. Henceforth, they are forced to endure a fantastic and inexplicable agenda of unimaginable circumstances, so scarcely credible that madness threatens to engulf them as they hope to return to normality.

Miriam's Presence at Christmas covers the last days of 2009 at the old house that Miriam, Roy and Rafa used to own. It is now Christmas and Miriam's now middle-aged youngest daughter, Florence and her two adult daughters, Faith and Betty are preparing for Christmas amid one of the worst snowstorms to befall London in recent years. There are incidences aplenty; Rafa to be visited in a care home, a disaster or two, headstrong children, a husband who needs to be divorced and old and long memories are stirred. But as Faith, heavily pregnant with her third child comes to realise, the spirit of Miriam (real or imaginary?) is not so far away.

When a London private investigator arrives in Torquay in 1955, he allows people to believe that he is a tourist. Brought in privately to investigate the death of an elderly woman who was almost buried alive, one by one he exposes the sordid and complex family secrets of its most respectable town members.