OUT NOW
The
Nightrider
How many lives can a single ride change?
Can the butterfly effect take the shape of one big, black horse and his rider, waiting on a petrol station forecourt in the dark of night?
Cai Sawyer - accountant, part time publican, heir to an artisan candy business, environmental activist, ex pony racer.
Cai is all of these and nothing, with a hole in his soul that has eaten the spirit of the boy he once was. He stumbles through life on autopilot, challenged only by Ariadne, his weird as all hell little sister, until he meets Orwen and her Trakehner Toby under February’s full moon.
Their chance encounter should have ended with a short but sweet thank-you kiss, but the tides of fortune have other ideas. As ripples become waves, change sweeps not just through Cai’s life but through that of a whole host of humans, horses and dogs, who are brought together by circumstance and leave as a tribe.
Written in the tradition of Iain Banks, if Iain Banks had written horse novels, The Nightrider is a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty, in which everybody is wide awake.
Horse Back Catalogue
Eleanor McGraw, vertically challenged, empathic and sharp daughter of folk musician Isabel Payne and a world famous rock guitarist, wakes up a few days shy of her 14th birthday to a life more ordinary.
After years of vagabonding around the world alongside a series of chaotic father figures, they are settling down with quiet Kjell, a Swedish dentist, on the outskirts of a small town on the South coast of England.
While exploring her new home’s surroundings, Eleanor discovers a solitary pony in a deserted plot of grazing land.
As she befriends the animal and meets scar-faced, foul-mouthed, 16-year-old Pike she is slowly drawn into another family’s tragic past and finds herself at the centre of a decision between life or death, past or future, beginning or end.
“What’s it to you, P? What is it you want?” Tinkerbelle snarled.
“Me?” Pike laughed quietly. “Battles and brimstone, fire and ash, fight evil and win, die a hero and return, marry the sprite princess, raise little Eleanors, bring up foals and…” He leant into her a little then. “I don’t flipping know – to somehow matter, I guess.”
With his girlfriend away travelling and a solitary autumn ahead of him, Pike, former dressage protégé and heir to two very different family traditions, finds himself alone with the question of what he wants to do with his life. In the meantime, there is a young stallion to train, a new friend to tame, some old ones to rescue and a mystery to solve.
NAME
17-year-old Tull has loved horses ever since he can remember but as the son of a single mum with more pressing things to pay for than riding lessons he’s never got closer than stroking them over the fence. Until one day a chance encounter with the most unlikely of girls opens the door to his dream. The question is, is it still the same dream? And is he tough enough to prove he’s worth living it?
As the button indicates you should be able to download this one FREE from amazon. Occasionally the big A sets it back to its original price though and then I have to hassle them. If it's not free there, go to smashwords, Barnes & Noble or Kobo instead. Or drop me a line. I'll sort you out.
No Horses
Sometimes the only thing that keeps us alive is someone not willing to let go
Not much stuff ever happens in Gull Cove.
Not in the town, not in its one and only secondary school, and definitely not in the life of 16-year-old Kirsty Matthews.
Pancake-faced and too chubby from being fed too much beige food over the years but not grossly overweight yet and planning to keep it that way, Kirsty is more of a people watcher than one to watch. Opinionated, with an eclectic taste in oldie music and an acerbic wit, she has one friend only and that's enough. Life is comfortably dull.
But when Caroline Connelly, of Cooking with Caroline fame, comes home to Gull Cove to teach a cookery class, Kirsty is teamed up at the stove with resident pain-in-the-arse Jake Deacon and suddenly, between chicken roast and fishcakes, her world is turned upside down and inside out with an abundance of stuff that changes her life forever.