Hello! Time for a takeover on my Blog today, a special treat for Publication Day of LILY’S SECRET! And the lovely Kirsty Ferry is here to share a bit of background to the book – it’s a book you don’t want to miss out on as I have already had the pleasure of reading it and loved it!!
So, over to you Kirsty……
Release Day Post: Lily’s Secret by Kirsty Ferry
I’m very happy that Lily’s Secret has now been published and how it’s added beautifully to my new Cornish Secrets series for Choc Lit. It’s a sequel to A Secret Rose and is set at Pencradoc, the same gothic old mansion on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, that has now made a name for itself as an Arts Centre.
It’s lovely creating these sort of places, because I can pick and choose how they look and what facilities they have! I tend to take parts of places I’ve visited and shamelessly use them – this time we have the historical thread incorporating a ‘Pageant’ that the children of the family put on, and I’ve borrowed bits from the likes of Lyme Park and Mount Grace Priory and Abbot’s Hall, which is part of the Museum of East Anglian Life in Suffolk.
All these places had, when we visited, images, photographs and even black and white home movies of children taking part in pageants and plays, and I thought it was the ideal backdrop to frame Victorian actress Lily Valentine and her scandalous secret – how something so innocent and fun can reveal something so shocking!
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but I loved creating Lily, who I based on famous, scandalous actresses of the day and discovering more about her contemporary counterpart, Cordelia, who you may remember was a minor character in A Secret Rose. This time, Cordelia is feeling rather disillusioned with her acting career and after her flat floods, she decides to come down to see her friend Merryn at Pencradoc – and thus the two actress’s lives collide …
Unlike Hartsford Hall in my Hartsford Mysteries series, Pencradoc is haunted in a very different way. With Hartsford, the ghosts tend to drift around all the time, but with Pencradoc, they only appear to people they have a connection with – and it’s usually to help tell someone their story and reveal a secret that’s hidden in the very fabric of the old buildings. I do hope you enjoy reading Lily’s Secret as much as I enjoyed creating it, and fall in love with little Lady Elsie who stomped right up to my keyboard and demanded some attention whilst I was writing. I had to reign her in a bit and promise Elsie her very own book when she was a big, grown up girl – but for now, this is Lily’s story and I do hope you like it.
About the book:
‘There’s nothing logical about Pencradoc!’ Aspiring actress Cordelia Beaumont is fed up of spending summer in the city. So, when the opportunity presents itself, she jumps straight on a train to pay a visit to Pencradoc – the beautiful Cornish estate where her friend Merryn works. But far from the relaxing break Cordy imagined, she soon finds herself immersed in the glamorous yet mysterious world of Victorian theatre sensation, Lily Valentine. Lily was once a guest at Pencradoc and, with the help of visiting artist Matt Harker, Cordy comes to discover that the actress left far more than memories at the old house. She also left a scandalous secret …
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About the author:
Kirsty Ferry is from the North East of England and lives there with her husband and son. She won the English Heritage/Belsay Hall National Creative Writing competition and has had articles and short
stories published in various magazines. Her work also appears in several anthologies, incorporating such diverse themes as vampires, crime, angels and more.
Kirsty loves writing ghostly mysteries and interweaving fact and fiction. The research is almost as much fun as writing the book itself, and if she can add a wonderful setting and a dollop of history, that’s even better.
Her day job involves sharing a building with an eclectic collection of ghosts, which can often prove rather interesting.
Find out more about Kirsty:
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