Susanna M. Newstead

I have always told tales. As a child I wrote little stories rooted in history and my teachers pestered me for the next instalment. I have always loved history especially the reign of King John, 1199-1216. It's the beginning of a lot of our development as a nation and so naturally anything I wrote was set in those years. The Savernake series has been over 40 years in the making. I started it as a young student of speech therapy in my 20s, writing the first by hand in a small orange notebook in pre-computer days. I put it away in a drawer where it sat breathing quietly for over forty years. Life and the need to pay the mortgage got in the way and when I changed professional direction and drifted into dementia research in Oxford, a very exacting and sometimes sad job, I began to read historical murder mysteries as a distraction from its hardships. I found I quite liked them. Might I write them myself? Then I got very ill and had to take early retirement. What was I to do with my time? The little orange notebook was dug out and Belvoir's Promise (the first in the series) became a murder mystery set in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, where I grew up. I spent a very long time in further research and one book led to another and so, the Savernake Novels were born. As time has gone on I have diversified and we now have three novels set in the 13th century which are in the series The Kennet Valley Tales; romance/adventure novels and three books in the Withershynnes series, magical realism/fantasy about a 13th century shapeshifting female 'detective' and her beau. Now I live quietly in a small town in Northamptonshire (soon to be moving back to my childhood home) with my husband and a wire fox terrier called Tabor. We make regular forays into the woods and have done a great deal of research into the emerging town of Marlborough close by, a town which was beloved of King John and given its charter by him in 1204. Tabor does the groundwork....and I follow along, plotting dire murder! Much more information is available at www.susannamnewstead.co.uk and on my Facebook page. The Savernake Novels.