When will the next book in the Pitfourie Series be published?

I hope to have finished Book 2 in the series, provisionally titled Bad Company, by the end of the year. People on my mailing list will receive an email to let them know when it's published - you can add your name to the list here.

What is it about?

With Mrs Mac now semi-retired, a new 'assistant' cook/housekeeper arrives at Pitfourie in the eye-catching form of a 29-year-old Amazon: long-legged, red-headed Claire Castleford. Local gossips are soon reporting that Claire is getting on altogether too well with her new employer. But Claire is in fact an undercover cop tasked with investigating the murder of a colleague, in which Hector has been implicated, and she has no intention of falling for his charms.

Meanwhile, Damian's friend Karen, now a school drop-out, has been caught embezzling money from Lorna's shop. As she takes up with a group of New Age travellers, her experiments with a life of crime are about to get a whole lot more serious...

What are the inspirations for the Pitfourie Series?

My family originates in the north-east of Scotland, and I have my mother, grandmother and other relatives to thank for a treasure chest of stories and incidents but most of all for giving me an indefinable sense of the way of life of the rural communities here. And for most of the vocabulary used in The Sweetest Poison! The north-east has its own very particular dialect, called the Doric, and words such as 'orra' and 'fooshty' lodged in my brain from an early age.

One of my favourite sets of novels is the Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, which evokes this part of the world so well.

I also love the Lymond series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett. While I would never attempt to create anything as complex and Byzantine, and Francis Crawford is of course a one-off, I like to think that he might appear somewhere in Hector and Damian's family tree.

How long did it take to write The Sweetest Poison?

That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer! I started it over a decade ago, finished it a few times (!), had a lot of help with it from my brilliant writer friends Lesley McLaren (whose crime novel was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger) and Lucy Lawrie (author of Tiny Acts of Love and The Last Day I Saw Her, published by Black and White and available on Amazon), and also input from two agents, one of whom worked with me on edits and then sent it out to the major London publishers. However, it didn't sell to any of them and I recently decided to publish via Amazon.

Please take a look at the 'More Books and Blogs' section of the website for details of Lesley and Lucy's work.

Is the character of Helen drawn from life?

Only in as far as any character has bits of the author in her mixed up with bits of other people, but mainly she comes from my imagination. I know there is almost a requirement in crime fiction currently for a feisty, kick-ass female lead, but I wanted my heroine in this story to be a sensitive, innocent, sweet person - the kind of person who just isn't equipped to stand up to her bullies and (oh so politically incorrectly!) goes running to Hector to 'save' her at every opportunity.

What happens when she's pushed and pushed and pushed...? When a person like that snaps, is the damage all the greater?

The standalone 'Risk of Harm' is very different from the Pitfourie Series - was that deliberate?

Yes, I wanted to write something completely different, with a different (rather grittier) 'feel' and different types of characters. It's also set in Scotland, but that's where the similarity ends, I think. It is in some ways a more conventional book, with a faster moving plot.

But there surely isn't much 'conventional' about the Johnson family...?!

I hope not!