Bird Mystery

Fourth story in a collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season. Working in a call centre normally offers few career opportunities. But it looks as if Tracy’s about to get her big break.

A mysterious suicide. An airbus A380 heads over the Colorado mountains, before crashing through the snow clouds. The only bridge over the River Styx is taken out. No phones, no internet, no communication with the outside world. Then things start to get strange. Welcome to a town called Hell. This collaborative collection of short stories takes place over the last seven days in Hell. Poisonous green slime, murderous rampages, talking trees, rogue wolf-packs - the residents of Hell are having a bad week.

This is a love story. It is a semi-fictional story derived from actual circumstance and real events, mostly observed from a male perspective, but strongly driven by females. These events occurred during the feminist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, which brutally took down many confused men and many unwary women as gender wars wrecked lives along the way. Admittedly, there were genuinely repressed women who were liberated as a result of that revolution, but it cannot be denied that there was a lot of collateral damage in the process.

Jazz singer Billie Stone has come back home to Sandhill Island to heal her psyche after a tragic accident that took her family. After a year in jail and penniless, Joe Franks thinks he deserves another chance. Just when Billie seems to be on the cusp of healing - and finding a new love - Franks’ rage spirals out of control. Have Billie’s losses made her strong enough to overcome once more, or will this final disaster be her undoing?

The moment Angelique arrives in Paris, she is taken prisoner by the SS. In a lonely little room, she is put in a chair with leather straps and a bloodstained seat and ordered to tell her captors everything she knows about the resistance. But Angelique knows nothing. She cares only for Martin, the boy who has been unable to speak since the bombs first fell during the Blitzkrieg. He has a secret - and she will protect it until her dying breath.