Blood From A Stone

I’m delighted to say that my new book, Jack’s seventh adventure, is out! If you look at the Books page on the website, you’ll see it in all its glory, but here’s a picture of the cover anyway.

The core of the mystery concerns a mega-valuable string of sapphires (this is fiction; those sapphires can be as valuable as you like. A merely Quite Expensive string of sapphires isn’t nearly as much fun to write about!) Now it’s taken for granted that the heroes and villains of a mystery have a backstory, but I pondered (as you do) about sapphires, did some reading up and – hey! The sapphires had a backstory too.

 

The best sapphires come from Ceylon or, as it’s now called, Sri Lanka, and granted that sapphires are pretty well indestructible, I thought it would be pretty cool to make them historic gems. The Ancient Romans knew about sapphires, so why not make them Roman? Yes, that had possibilities. When I was thinking about the book, there was a lot in the news about the Anglo-Saxon hoard discovered in Staffordshire, so why not make them part of a Roman hoard? I didn’t want Jack to discover them – that wouldn’t work in the story – so I put the discovery back a couple of centuries and made the sapphires an Eighteenth Century find, which gave me some great background for Breagan Grange, the country house owned by the Leigh family I was busily creating. The word “hoard” wasn't used in Georgian times to describe buried treasure, so I cast around and came up with the name “Breagan Bounty”, which seemed to fit.

 

Naturally when you get a string of sapphires as valuable as those in the Breagan Bounty, someone wants them...