I’m delighted… I have much pleasure in…. My guest today is someone I feel I know intimately. That’s because I edited the book he comes from: Purgatory Hotel by Crooked Cat author, Anne-Marie Ormsby. And that’s why I’m having difficulty introducing him – because, between you and me, I’m not sure I really want to meet him.
Ah, here he is! Welcome to the blog, Jackson. Do tell us what disappointed you today.
D,
You came down for breakfast late today, only a few minutes but I noticed.
You wouldn’t look at me. Why?
You wore that Lolita book cover t-shirt that I bought you, and I always feel like you’re communicating with me when you wear it. Or if you are reading a book I gave you, I feel like you must be thinking about me.
You looked tired, like you didn’t sleep all night, had you been crying?
I couldn’t bear it. I just wanted to get up and pull you up into my arms, and make you OK again, like it didn’t matter anymore about anything else. It just mattered that I hold you then, at that moment, that I let you know how much I love you and that everything would be fine and I didn’t care who knew it.
When you left I hoped you would look at me for just a second, just turn your beautiful eyes to me, just long enough so I’d know you’d seen me, just one look is enough to let me know you are still mine.
But you didn’t look at me, you just mumbled a goodbye and walked out.
And I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Like I’d actually lost you, you had finally gone, the spell broken, the dream over.
But it’s me that’s under your spell isn’t it? It’s me who’s trapped, my soul tethered to yours forever.
Some days I feel like you’ve been dragging me around for centuries. Me forever your shadow, ghosting you in silence.
But some nights when you look at me, and you truly see me, it’s like that first moment we saw each other. It’s all new again and I’m more alive than I have ever been, every nerve electric, my heart clattering in my chest, banging out your name.
If only you had looked at me this morning. Just for a second.
It rained all day and I felt like I had lost you.
But I’m always losing you. Every day. Every night.
Please come back to me, please.
Jackson
Thank you for that, Jackson. Erm, nice meeting you.
Readers, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. But Jackson is not what he seems from this letter. I think he’s very selfish and inconsiderate, but that might just be me.
About Purgatory Hotel
Dakota Crow has been murdered, her body dumped in a lonely part of the woods, and nobody knows but her and her killer.
Stranded in Purgatory, a rotting hotel on the edge of forever, with no memory of her death, Dakota knows she must have done something bad to be deposited among murderers and rapists. To get to somewhere safer, she must hide from the shadowy stranger stalking her through the corridors of the hotel, and find out how to repent for her sins.
But first she must re-live her life.
Soon she will learn about her double life, a damaging love affair, terrible secrets, and lies that led to her violent death.
Dakota must face her own demons, and make amends for her own crimes before she can solve her murder and move on.
But when she finds out what she did wrong, will she be truly sorry?
You can find Purgatory Hotel on Amazon UK and Amazon US.
About Anne-Marie Ormsby
On a warm day in July 1978, a mother was admitted to hospital, awaiting the arrival of her new baby. She was reading Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie and the midwives thought it a gruesome choice for an expectant mother. A story of a long forgotten murder and repressed memories. As it turned out her new baby, Anne-Marie would grow up and find herself drawn to all things macabre, and would one day herself turn out a story of murder and memories lost. Anne Marie grew up on the Essex coast with her parents and six siblings in a house that was full of books and movies and set the scene for her lifelong love of both. She began writing short stories when she was still at primary school after reading the book The October Country by Ray Bradbury. He was and still is her favourite author and the reason she decided at age 9 that she too would be a writer someday. In her teens she continued to write short stories and branched out into poetry, publishing a few in her late teens. In her early twenties she began committing herself to writing a novel and wrote one by the age of 20 that she then put away, fearing it was too weird for publication. She wrote Purgatory Hotel over several years, but again kept it aside after several rejections from publishers. Luckily for her, she found a home for her twisted tale with Crooked Cat Books. Her favourite authors include Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Denis Lehane and Douglas Coupland. She also takes great inspiration from music and movies, her favourite artists being Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Johnny Cash, Interpol, David Lynch and David Fincher. Anne-Marie moved to London in 2008 where she lives to this day, amidst books and DVDs, with her husband and daughter.
Anne-Marie Ormsby can be found on her website, Facebook and Twitter.
About The Cocktail Bar
Isabella May lives in (mostly) sunny Andalucia, Spain with her husband, daughter and son, creatively inspired by the sea and the mountains. When she isn’t having her cake and eating it, sampling a new cocktail on the beach, or ferrying her children to and from after school activities, she can usually be found writing.
How’s maman? Again, you didn’t say much in your last letter papa and I’m worried. I realise how difficult it must be for you, but I just need to know that she’s all right.
…yes I’m travelling up to Paris on the 9th and I will be with you and maman for the whole of Easter. I’m looking forward to it and I’d be happy to take the boys wherever they want to go. It will be good to catch up with them and Thérèse as well. Perhaps, whilst I’m there, you and I can take a look at the laptop that I brought you last year. Keeping in touch would be so much easier, papa, if you would just use the computer.
Sacrificing his job in investigation following a shooting in Paris, Jacques Forêt has only a matter of weeks to solve a series of mysterious disappearances as a rural gendarme. Will he find the perpetrators before his lover Beth becomes a victim?
Sue has a mind which is sufficiently warped as to be capable of compiling questions for BBC Radio 4’s fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz. This once caused one of her sons to describe her as “professionally weird.” The label has stuck.
Discovery is Only the Beginning
Yvonne Marjot was born in England, grew up in New Zealand, and now lives on the Isle of Mull in western Scotland. She has a Masters in Botany from Victoria University of Wellington, and a keen interest in the interface between the natural and human worlds. She has always made up stories and poems, and once won a case of port in a poetry competition (New Zealand Listener, May 1996). In 2012 she won the Britwriters Award for poetry, and her first volume of poetry, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing.
Dedicated to the people of Kenya, BREATH OF AFRICA is a novel by 
Jane has been a businesswoman and intermittent freelance journalist for fifty years, mainly in Kenya.
Bristol, England in the mid-nineteenth century is rife with change. For one young man, James Winthrop Blackwell, change is what he yearns for. Abandoned as an infant at Alpheton House orphanage in Bristol, he comes of age and struggles to make sense of the God of his youth, unable to come to terms with a mother and father who had deserted him.
When Percy Sullivan’s family take over Lakeham Abbey for the summer, it was a chance to get away from battered post-war London and be cossetted by the capable and pretty housekeeper, Anne Pargeter.
Miriam Drori, Author 