STORYWORLD

THE SAVAGE INSTINCT, release date May 18th 2021 It's been almost eight years since I made the startling discovery that the street just around the corner from my grandmother's house in Hetton-le-Hole, Tyne and Wear, UK was actually the birthplace of Mary Ann Cotton, one of Britain's most prolific murderers. Once I started reading about her case and the sensation it caused in the newspapers of the time (1872-73), I knew I had to write a novel inspired in some way by the events at the time. I didn't want to write it from the murderer's point of view. Many articles written since that time have argued about the extent of Cotton's guilt, and there is still wide disagreement about how many people she actually killed. Instead I was more interested in how the case influenced the men and women reading the newspapers at the time and how it caused sensation and outrage at a time when women's roles were restricted to the domestic sphere, and fulfilling one'

Sorry it's been a while since I posted. Sometimes you just get lost in your various projects and caught up with submissions to publishers. Well - after a long and torturous process, my historical novel, UNNATURAL, was passed by major publishers despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback it received . This happens in the publishing industry and you just have to keep on going. So I took a good look at the manuscript and decided to publish it myself. I've had great luck with THE PITMAN'S DAUGHTER which continues to sell steadily and hit the Amazon bestseller list several times. I've renamed the book THE SAVAGE INSTINCT and I'll explain why. The book is mainly about the perception of women in the Victorian era, a time when women's sole purpose was to be "the angel at the hearth" - a wife and mother selflessly devoted to her family. A person who had few, if any rights as an individual and owned no property because what was hers, was automatically