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My New Book, Writing, and Advice for Authors: My Interview for the Activated Authors ‘Member Spotlight’ Series

27th May 2023 by claireladds 3 Comments

I was very excited to be interviewed this week by the lovely Daniel Willcocks of Activated Authors. The interview is part of the ‘Member Spotlight’ series – and I was actually interviewed on the release day for Hers or Mine, my psychological suspense novel!

In the interview, we talk about inspiration for Hers or Mine, writing processes and routines, the help that Activated Authors has given me, writing advice and loads of other good stuff.

You can find this EXCLUSIVE interview on the Activated Authors website by clicking the button below.

READ THE INTERVIEW

Curious about what goes on in this psychological suspense book? You can find out more about it here.

Hers or Mine: a New Psychological Suspense Thriller OUT NOW!

23rd May 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

I am beyond excited to tell you that Hers or Mine, my latest psychological suspense thriller, is available to buy from today! This is the first of several psychological suspense books I have for you in 2023, and I really hope you’ll love reading them.

So, what’s my new book about? Well…

COULD YOUR SECRETS BE THE DEATH OF YOU?

To the neighbours, Lucy and Andy are an ordinary couple with good jobs and a quiet life. But they’re hiding a dark secret. And it’s tearing them apart.

Seven years ago, you took my life away. And I want it back.

Life as Andy’s wife isn’t what Lucy thought it would be. Andy has become obsessive. It’s as if she’s a prisoner. Their secret has turned Andy into a manipulative control freak, and Lucy stays in hiding, inside the house. Her business will fall apart if she doesn’t do something, and she’s mortified by Andy’s serial philandering since their secret took hold of them in its vice-like grip. So, when a leaflet arrives for a hotel designed for struggling creatives, Lucy is desperate to persuade Andy that going there, for a break and to give her a chance to sort her head out, will make things better.

Andy has issues of his own: the temptation of an affair that he’s trying to keep under control, Lucy’s increasingly problematic behaviour, and the guilty knowledge of what he did seven years before. But when Lucy threatens to reveal their secret, he has no choice but to let her out of his sight. What harm can a few days do?

The time is coming. The plan is in place. And you’ll be here soon.

But Andy begins to regret his decision. Letting Lucy go off alone might have been really stupid. Can she keep the secret safe? How dangerous is Lucy’s behaviour? When Andy gets a disturbing phone call from his wife, he’s determined to go and get her back.

But at the hotel everyone is hiding secrets and telling lies. Someone is playing a twisted game. And they have murder in mind.

No one knows you’re here. No one knows who you really are. And no one will know if you disappear forever…

A twisty psychological suspense novel. It’s game on – and it’s about as personal as it gets. When everyone is lying, who do you trust?

You can find Hers or Mine on a whole variety of online bookstores, and you can find them all using the button below.

If you prefer to get your books for your local library or a library app, you can do that, too! Just request Hers or Mine from your librarian or through your preferred library app.

I’m currently working on the paperback and hardback, and both should be available in the near future.

BUY HERS OR MINE

Happy reading (and I hope – in the nicest possible way – you get some shivers of suspense up your back, too! 😁)!

Claire

Beneath the Flesh: a FREE Darker Minds e-book when you join my Readers’ Club – Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 5)

4th March 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Welcome to the fifth and final part of my mini-series, touting my love for writing prologues!

Today’s extract is quite a long one, as the prologue itself is split between the viewpoints of two main characters, from opposing backgrounds and with vastly different character traits. Prologues can, most definitely, be used to emphasise what the characters are like. I don’t think it’s easy (or necessarily helpful to the book) to use a prologue only for this purpose because the whole book itself, chapter by chapter, should be doing this anyway. But what the prologue can do is show how a character behaves and set up the reader’s expectation for the ways they might react when problems begin to be thrown at them – or, in my book’s case, probably murder…

The extract I have for you today is from Beneath the Flesh. This is, at the time of writing, the book I offer exclusively as a FREE gift to readers who sign up for my Readers’ Club emails. As you’ve probably gathered, the prologue gives the reader a massive insight into the main characters of the book. It also sets up an incident (often called the inciting incident) which directly leads to everything that happens in the main story. Without it, the rest of the action, suspicions and skulduggery would have nothing to hang on. Look at this prologue at a very wordy coat hanger, if you want!

There you have it – the final part of my mini-series showing you how much I love prologues and how I use them. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the extracts. If you want to read more of my work, you’ll find details of all my books on this website and also on many e-book stores.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

P.S. The one obvious profanity is replaced with **** for the purposes of this extract.

[Read more…]

Show Me Dead: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 4)

25th February 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Welcome to Part 4 of my mini-series on my love for prologues, and where I’m giving you a bit of an insight into how I use them, and what they do to add that bit extra to the reading experience.

There’s a couple of things I’ve not yet mentioned in this mini-series about prologues and the functions they can serve. For me, certainly in today’s extract, these two functions go hand-in-hand. One is the way they can set the tone of the book. The extract in this post is from Show Me Dead, a suspense thriller which adopts elements of the Gothic to set its tone, and certainly also skirts the borders of horror. You’ll see that I use physical darkness in the prologue to allow the main character’s imagination and memory to run amok and reveal some of her darkest secrets, right from the beginning. The book itself allows her to explain why over the course of the story.

The other function this particular prologue serves is more of a narrative, structural device. I don’t want to say anything about the story itself in too much detail here, because I don’t want to spoil the book if you’ve not yet read it, but the device I’m talking about here is the cyclic structure. This involves beginning a book in a particular place (either physically or psychologically) and developing the story in such a way that, by the end, the structure of the story has returned to the place it started – but with massive changes. It really hits home to the reader, then, how the character has changed as a consequence of the events in the book. The prologue used this way portrays something one way in order for it to be clear that this specific ‘something’ is very different by the end of the book, or has been adapted to create a hugely different feel to the tone, or possibly even an extension of, or a complete twist on, the prologue.

As we are less than a month away from International Women’s Day as I write this, I felt it appropriate to include Angel, a character I grew to love and respect, and admire more than I can say. I traced her story through some of the most horrendous incidents imaginable. Of all my female characters so far, she stands apart as determined, resilient, and an example of strength – if a somewhat dark one (I have tears in my eyes while I’m writing this. You can tell how strongly I feel about my characters, and Angel in particular). If you have already met the character of Angel, I hope you love her. If you haven’t, then I hope she intrigues you.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

[Read more…]

No Deadlier Time: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 3)

18th February 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Welcome back, to part three of my mini-series on my love for prologues. And, you know, I really do love them! I have realised that, to date, all of my novels have some form of prologue, although not all of them are labelled as such.

I love planting seeds (and definitely not the gardening kind – my dad could tell you about my efforts from a very young age at how adept I clearly was, even then, at destroying the planting!). The seeds contained in a prologue could, potentially, make or break a reader’s full experience of the story – or the story that I, as author, have imagined you will experience, that I want you to engage with and think about, long after you’ve read the book.

As I said in Part 1 of this mini-series on prologues, there are various reasons for using a prologue in a story, but the most important thing to remember as a writer is that it has to do something. It’s not just a random scene that is disconnected from the story. Quite the opposite – it’s intrinsic to the story in some way. Without it, it’s possible that there are deeper elements to the narrative, or potentially even basic and important ones, that the reader would miss out on if the prologue wasn’t there.

If you’ve read any of my books, or read the extracts in the other posts in this mini-series, you may have realised I have often used the prologue as a device to point the reader to something that happened at some time before the book ‘proper’ gets started. In the extract from The Secrets That Haunt Us, for instance, the letters directly impact the ‘present’ of the story. Because of those letters, two characters have already set their course of action for the story, and the prologue goes some way to explain why, although the full impact of those letters at the beginning is fully and tragically clear until much later on. In the extract from That Killer Image, an event in the villain’s past leads to his atrocity later in life – and here I also give the reader a sneak peek into the truly creepy, split-second, psychological moment that follows him through the entire novel.

Today’s extract is the prologue from No Deadlier Time. This book is a suspense thriller which borders on (or for some readers, is) also psychological horror. Again, because I just can’t help myself it seems, this reveals a past event which impacts so much more than the main characters of the story. It foreshadows what might happen, should Harry, a boy in this prologue, follow in his father’s footsteps once he’s older. But does he? You won’t know unless you read the book (no spoilers here!). It also introduces another character who appears in a minor role here, yet is embroiled in this family’s story in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Or can you..?

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

[Read more…]

That Killer Image: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 2)

11th February 2023 by claireladds 1 Comment

Welcome to the second in my mini-series as I give a bit of well-deserved love to one of my favourite writing devices – prologues (and I love reading them, too!).

The extract I have for you today is from That Killer Image, one of my Darker Minds Crime & Suspense books. I have a particular love of prologues that show the reader something that happened in the past life of one of the characters, and which directly influences the life of the clear ‘villain’ of the book. It allows the reader to keep this event in mind as they watch the villain build up to their darkest deed of all, or maybe change over the course of the story and come to terms with this event of the past. The reader has an opportunity to question the behaviour, knowing what they do about the character. It may even make the reader complicit in the dark deeds, or at best, unable to do anything but watch and shout, ‘No, don’t do it!’ But, imprisoned in the book as he/she is, the villain can’t hear you…

I’m not giving away spoilers by telling you that this prologue is all about Anthony, and if you’ve read the novel you’ll know how quickly it’s obvious that he’s going to be the bad boy of the book. We first meet him when he a small boy. Anthony loves and adores his mother, and in particular, certain features about her. A specific event that occurred in his childhood has a massive impact on his psychology – and on his dreadful motivations for what he does (which I’m definitely not giving away!) in That Killer Image. I hope you enjoy it. Or that it creeps you out, just a bit, by the end. Either way, it means the prologue did one of its jobs!

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

P.S. I’ve replaced any swear words in the novel with ****, for the purposes of this extract. Please also be aware that this scene contains domestic abuse and death/murder and in no way condones either. If this is likely to upset or trigger you in any way, please skip this extract.

Edited 10th March 2023

Unfortunately, this extract is no longer available to read. If you’d like to read the prologue (and the rest of the book!), you can buy it on Amazon, or read with your Kindle Unlimited subscription.