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fiction, Front Page, YouCaxton

Presumed Dead
James Holder

Bored with his job, with no real prospects and barely a penny to his name, the last thing Wally Mortimer needed was a letter from a solicitor delivered to his home one Saturday morning. But instead of a letter threatening legal action for one of his many unpaid bills, things are about to change for Wally - the letter tells him that he has inherited the estate of George Hart, a wealthy benefactor unknown to him.
Assured that the letter is genuine, he turns to his family to see if they can tell him anything about his benefactor. But the only lead they can give him is one from his grandmother whose fading memory remembers a George Hart who died more than 60 years ago.
So, who is George Hart, Wally’s benefactor? Is it just a coincidence that his grandmother once knew someone with the same name? If not, who is he and why did he leave his estate to Wally? Wally’s attempts to find an answer lead literally to a dead end. It is not until he finds a notebook at the chateau he has inherited that he discovers who George Hart was and uncovers secrets about his family unknown to them, secrets never meant to be discovered.
Published: September 2021
Hardback: 212 pages
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 97819144424076
Available from Amazon

James Holder was born in Somerset and, after reading law at Cambridge University, practised as a solicitor; he now works as a consultant.
He and his wife have four children and two grandchildren and live in Oxfordshire.
Also by James Holder...
The Great War’s Sporting Casualties
Front Page, Sport

Football’s Golden Decades
Barry McLoughlin

Football’s Golden Decades
Four of Wembley finest finals
Decades before England’s Euro 2020 success, there was another gilded era for English football… massive crowds packed stadiums as fans regained their hunger for professional soccer after the war. From the sensational Cup Final of 1939 to England’s World Cup triumph twenty-seven years later, football was still in its Age of Innocence, before superstardom and eye-watering wages. Players were part of the same community as those who watched them – and, thanks to the maximum wage, didn’t earn much more than them either. The business of playing and watching football has been transformed beyond recognition since then. Grounds are safer and more comfortable, players are faster and fitter. Tactically, too, football is much more sophisticated than when players used to line up in a rigid 2–3–5 formation. Yet, as the game has become a multi-billion pound industry, fuelled at the top end by lucrative TV contracts, has soccer lost its soul?
Published:Oct 2021
Paperback:119 pages
Colour images:50
Size:6 x 9 ins
Price:£9.99
ISBN:9-781913-425982

£9.99 (+ £3.50 postage)
Number of copies:
In a blend of personal reminiscence and reportage, Barry McLoughlin – the son of an FA Cup-winning England international – looks back to four of the most famous Wembley finals, and examines the social and cultural background of the era through a study of grounds and football programmes. Packed with colour and black and white illustrations, it’s an essential guide to a pivotal period in British football.

fiction

London Blood
Ian McKinney

LONDON BLOOD

A bomb explodes at Angel Underground Station. Two years later the survivors are being brutally murdered. MI5 begin searching for a terrorist mastermind. While Matt Ross, a detective with PTSD and a guilty secret, believes that it is linked to the drug case he is investigating.

Neither realise that they are actually in the middle of a vampire vendetta.

Only Edward Jago understands that London could soon be overrun by new vampires. Nobody wants that – least of all its old vampires. And as the line between mortal and immortal becomes increasingly blurred, will Ross find the truth or will he pay for his curiosity with his own blood?
Published:Aug 2021
Paperback:308 pages
Price:£10.99
ISBN:9-781914-424236

 Available from Amazon
Books by Ian McKinney...

London Blood

Scouse Gothic 1 - The Pool of Life... and Death

Scouse Gothic 2 - Blood Brothers... and Sisters

Scouse Gothic 3 - All you need is blood?




fiction

Scouse Gothic 2
Ian McKinney

9781911175131 This is the second book in the Scouse Gothic series by Ian McKinney.

Sheryl wakes; why can’t she move? Where’s Lee? – Is he safe? Return to the bizarre world of Scouse Gothic where Melville mourns another lost love and searches for clues to her disappearance. Where Lathom decides to have a fresh start in Liverpool but finds his past waiting to haunt him and where Peter finds love but is having trouble with some ‘psycho’ mice. Meanwhile Frank finds that being a pigeon can have its drawbacks. But, two questions remain to be answered: who is the man in black? - And is blood really thicker than water?



Books by Ian McKinney...

London Blood

Scouse Gothic 1 - The Pool of Life... and Death

Scouse Gothic 2 - Blood Brothers... and Sisters

Scouse Gothic 3 - All you need is blood?
Published:1st March 2016
Paperback:218 pages
Price:£9.99
ISBN:9-781911-175131

 Available from Amazon
and Kindle e-books

Pay with PayPal
£9.99 (+ £2 postage)


Reader Reviews...

Amazon Review: Maz
I really enjoyed Scouse Gothic 2, even more than Scouse Gothic 1 which I loved ... Ian McKinney has certainly found a niche combining humorous fiction, intelligent plots and interesting history all set against the backdrop of Liverpool, the place and especially the people. It is a real page-turner.

fiction

Scouse Gothic
Ian McKinney

Cover_Hutchings_Scouse Gothic_02032015_9781909644519_v1-1 Melville wakes with a pounding headache – there had been too many hangovers recently, but this one felt different. What had he been drinking last night? Then he remembered – it was blood. Enter the bizarre world of Scouse Gothic where a reluctant vampire mourns a lost love and his past lives, where a retired ‘hit man’ plans one more killing and dreams of food, and a mother sets out to avenge her son’s murder, and, meanwhile, a grieving husband is visited by an angry angel. Set in present day Liverpool, vampires and mortals co-exist, unaware of each others’ secrets and that their past and present are inextricably linked.

But as their lives converge, who will be expected to atone for past sins?



Books by Ian McKinney...

London Blood

Scouse Gothic 1 - The Pool of Life... and Death

Scouse Gothic 2 - Blood Brothers... and Sisters

Scouse Gothic 3 - All you need is blood?
Published:1st May 2015
Paperback:198 pages
Price:£9.99
ISBN:9-781909-644519

 Available from Amazon
and Kindle e-books

Pay with PayPal
£9.99 (+ £2 postage)


Reader Reviews...

Amazon Review: Sarah Barnett
If you've never read any gothic fiction, then Scouse Gothic by Ian McKinney is a great place to start. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The characters are many and varied, and held my interest throughout. The plot lines weave teasingly from chapter to chapter, and the characters move effortlessly backwards and forwards through different times and places in history.

Amazon Review Mr. A. K. Tierney
I really liked this book. It weaves the seemingly different stories of a strange group of characters together ... with classic human feelings of love hate malice, avarice, revenge and lust for power. It does so with a lovely blend of light and dark humour ... the characterisations are believable and the plot has for me the right amount of complexity with out trying to be too clever.
fiction

Scouse Gothic 3
Ian McKinney

CS Cover.indd This is the third book in the Scouse Gothic series by Ian McKinney.

Life can be difficult – even when you’re dead.
Lathom lies awake. His nights are plagued by nightmares and his days by hallucinations and cravings for blood. Worse still he’s stone cold sober all the time - immortality has its drawbacks. Melville has decided to put his past behind him and live for the future - unfortunately his past has other ideas. Peter is worried that his research might create human vampires - and also that he may already know one. Frank ponders how to make an omelette without breaking your favourite egg. And Sheryl wonders if it’s unnatural for vampires to live together. Perhaps, love isn’t all you need – perhaps all you need is blood.



Books by Ian McKinney...

London Blood

Scouse Gothic 1 - The Pool of Life... and Death

Scouse Gothic 2 - Blood Brothers... and Sisters

Scouse Gothic 3 - All you need is blood?
Published:1st Jan 2017
Paperback:224 pages
Price:£9.99
ISBN:9-781911-175445

 Available from Amazon
and Kindle e-books

Pay with PayPal
£9.99 (+ £2 postage)


Reader Reviews...
fiction

Adela Basset
Joanne McShane

Adela Basset
In this, the sequel to Mistress Whiddon, we find ourselves in December 1611. The Basset family of Umberleigh has been bankrupted as a result of Robert Basset’s misguided notion to lodge a claim to the throne of England after the death of Elizabeth I. When a daughter is born just nine months after his return from exile both he and his traumatised wife refuse to acknowledge the child. She is rescued from an uncertain fate by her older sister, Anne, who names her Adela.
When Anne leaves Umberleigh in 1614 to marry Jonathan Rashleigh of Menabilly in Cornwall, she takes her young sister with her.
As a child Adela struggles with feelings of rejection and, as she enters her womanhood, with the conflicting emotions she feels for the two men in her life; her childhood friend, the woodcutter’s son, Gilbert, and her dashing Cavalier cousin, Thomas Basset.
Her story is told against the backdrop of the tumultuous politics of 17th century Cornwall and Jonathan Rashleigh’s own close involvement with the Royalist cause during the Civil War.
Published: Sept 2020
Paperback: 240 pages
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 9-781913-425456

UK Only
£9.99 (+ £2.50 postage)
Number of copies:

Available on Amazon

For Australia and USA, order from Amazon.com
Joanne spent her childhood on a sheep and cattle farm in Tasmania, Australia. After marrying and raising a family in Tasmania she moved to Wales in 2003 and still lives there, close to the Herefordshire border. Always a keen historian, she became fascinated by her own family history and by the lives of her ancestors - some of whom she discovered to be very colourful indeed.
This led her to begin writing. Honora and Arthur - The Last Plantagenets is her first published book.
In her own words 'I am the end product of a melting pot ranging from convicts to Royalty. There are so many stories waiting to be told. I just hope I live long enough to do it.'

Books by Joanne McShane...

 Honora and Arthur - the Last Plantagenets

Mistress Whiddon

Lillias

Adela Basset

Miss Jane

Reviews...


livesinprint

A Miner Goes to War – Service in North Africa and Italy
E. C. Hamer

A memoir of a Welsh childhood and wartime service in North Africa and Italy (1923-1945)
 Edited by Pat Wilson, Ernest Hamer and Anne Kleiser

Eddie Hamer’s memoir gives a unique insight into working-class life in the first half of the 20th century. It is often humorous, sometimes angry, and always informative. It begins with a history of his workingclass Welsh mining family, based on his own memories and on a series of discussions with his father in the 1960s - while there was still time to record first-hand accounts of his family’s story in the decades before he was born.
There follows his childhood in Huddersfi eld and North Wales in the 1920s. The poverty and hardship that his family endured is vividly described and the now-unthinkable responsibilities he had to shoulder at a young age - but this was also a boyhood of freedom, camaraderie and adventures.
The final sections of Eddie’s memoir are based on the diaries he kept during his service in World War 2: his training in the U.K. and his service in North Africa and Italy as a gunner in the Royal Artillery.
Published: March 2021
Paperback: 286 pages
Price: £11.99
ISBN: 9-781913-425722

£11.99 (+ £3.00 postage)
Number of copies:
Eddie left school at the age of fourteen to work down Llay Main coal mine. His early working life from his first day underground comes alive, with many personal anecdotes set in context by clear explanations of how a coal mine functioned in the 1930s.
After the war he qualified and eventually became Chief Mining Surveyor in two collieries in South Wales. He was married with one son and one daughter and died in 1990.
Reader Reviews...

Alison Hembrow, The Royal Regiment of Wales Museum

This book is a gem: a combination of recollections of working-class childhood and early adulthood in the first half of the twentieth century, family stories, and war diaries – all seen through the lens of a fiercely independent man with strong socialist views. It’s a valuable first-hand insight into lives and times that are in danger of being forgotten. It’s also a gripping and eye-opening read which has been carefully brought to press by members of Eddie Hamer's family who recognise the importance of his memoir.
“A Miner Goes to War” is presented in two distinct halves. The first is recollections of childhood and early life growing up in a working-class family in Wales and Yorkshire in the 1920s and 1930s. Recorded several decades later, Eddie's strong left-wing views shine through in his emotive descriptions of his family being part of “the rabble of history”. His mother’s family were Welsh miners, his father's family woollen workers from mid-Wales, both struggling to find regular employment and make ends meet.
Moving to Yorkshire in search of work, Eddie’s family found themselves in cramped accommodation unfit for human habitation. His early teens featured trips to the abattoir to collect a bucket of intestines to provide meals, war-wounded teachers, earth closets, early deaths, and further deprivation during the General Strike.
At 14 Eddie leaves school and goes down the mine. He and his family are now in north Wales. Detailed descriptions of the working conditions, equipment used, and jobs done give an insight into a harsh world in which pit disasters and deaths were frequent. His aptitude is spotted and he starts night school classes to qualify as a mining surveyor.
Although the memories aren’t all chronological, and they are seen through the prism of Eddie's adult beliefs, they give a strong flavour of lives which were lead by many but recorded by few. Interspersed with vignettes touching on current affairs, they bring to life an existence experienced by millions in a way a more traditional historical account cannot.
Photos and hand-drawn maps and plans divide this first section from Eddie's war diaries which form the second half of the book. These diaries have a different character altogether. Written as he completed his basic training as a gunner in the Royal Artillery and served in North Africa and Italy, they have an immediacy and level of detail that gives a sobering insight into the day-to-day experiences of a soldier and the horrors of war.
Eddie brings an admirable humanity to his encounters on active service: fetching a medical orderly to dress the wound of a young Italian girl, sharing water-melons with Arab children, cooking fried tomatoes with locals. His interests are wide-ranging: he describes the workings of Italian bombs, the quality of German dugouts, the architecture of mosques, the historical interest of Pompeii compared with the squalor of Naples, and rearing Regimental turkeys for Christmas lunch. He also records the 104 degree fever he suffered, the horrors of rampant dysentery in the regiment, the limbs lost by close comrades in a premature explosion, and cemeteries full of teenage German casualties.
When Eddie's narrative ends in 1944 , his brief notes and Release Leave Certificate are included as an Afterword. His military conduct was officially described as “Exemplary”. “A Miner Goes to War” is exemplary in preserving for future generations and researchers the personal experience of an upbringing in a mining family and service in World War Two. Having just read Captain Tom Moore’s “Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day”, I can see parallels in two accounts of growing up in the 1920s and serving in World War Two from contemporaries who both bring a personal perspective to aspects of national history.
Books such as this add a different dimension to more traditional accounts, and are a valuable addition to the bookshelves of anyone wanting to find out more about aspects of life in the first half of the 20th century.

Review of “A Miner Goes to War” by Neil Wilson

I really enjoyed “A Miner Goes to War”. The memories are personal, but they seem to capture the period very well. It’s a powerful reminder of what the world was like when the welfare state was a lot smaller. Anyone who utters the words, ‘safety gone mad’, will be reminded of what the world could be like; a world where people get killed in accidents and everyone else carries on working. Reading this book made me realise how much we take for granted in modern Britain. Social improvements were hard won, and can be easily lost.
It’s a book with powerful contrasts. This was an era when kids could play on the local scrap heap, build tree houses in the woods, swim in the river and crawl under the market stalls looking for fruit. But this childhood freedom is tinged with a sense of fatalistic sadness. Once he was in the army, he never knew where he would be in a few hours. Every moment of the day was planned for him, mingled with the unexpected attack from a passing plane or an ambush.
Each memory is filled with powerful emotions, taking the reader back in time. As he walks through the woods past a house that’s supposed to be haunted, we imagine how we’d have felt as young child. There are moments of tension, when a farmer catches them stealing apples. Moments of enchantment, when his uncle dresses up as Father Christmas. Moments of anger, when workers are deliberately under paid. We see the world through E. C. Hamer’s eyes, and grow older with him. He really captures how a person thinks at different ages, but with little retrospectives showing how he saw things as an older adult. Considering how much hardship there is, from the miners’ strike to the war, there’s a positive feeling to the book. There are many moments of camaraderie, from the kids building a bonfire together, to the miners playing their instruments underground. There’s a feeling that people do come together in the face of adversity.
E. C. Hamer captures the realities of war very well. There are so many details, like the friendly fire, the shells that malfunction, trading soap for eggs with the locals, the ‘enemy’ leaving dirty protests in the houses before they retreat and the German deserters they find hiding in a cave.
His account comes across as remarkably honest. E.C Hamer has a lot to be proud of, but he also shares his regrets, including one time as a child when he was peer pressured into putting a firework through someone’s letter box. It’s a combination of stark honesty, bravery, hard work, empathy, ironic humour and self reflection, that makes E.C. Hamer such a likeable narrator.