This is what I'm working on at the moment and I'd love to have any comments or reactions.

If you would like a taster, you can download the first three chapters of Watching Over Her.

If you'd like to read some of the other chapters in proof and perhaps even share your thoughts about the characters or settings, or how the story develops, then email: watching@sleepingpartner.co.uk

Karina hasn't seen her old school-friend Julia for ten years, and when they meet for lunch and she hears about Julia's rich new husband Stuart and the country house where she now lives, she can hardly recognise the girl she knew and loved. But then Julia's poise cracks, and she confides that she is frightened of Stuart, even suspects that he is planning to kill her.

Karina at once agrees to help. She has no ties in London and will move back to Ashton to watch over Julia, Her friend is relieved, filled with gratitude, and they toast their renewed alliance against a hostile world.

But meanwhile they are being observed; and instead of protecting her friend, Karina's own life will soon hang on a knife-edge.

"The idea for this novel came from watching two women in their early thirties in a pizza restaurant one quiet widweek lunchtime in a small town that had better remain nameless. They were celebrating something, rather conspiratorial, and finished the meal by toasting each other with brandies. It was intriguing, and over the weeks that followed I tried to imagine what had led up to that scene, and what happened next. The novel itself has been surprisingly difficult to write. I've changed the structure, the narrative voice, the ending. I've put it aside and worked on other things. Now it's pretty much there - except perhaps for the title..."

Ten years ago, student Laura Starke disappeared from the remote French village of St Quentin. Despite a major police hunt, and televised appeals from her family and her boyfriend Robert, no trace of her was ever found.

Robert is now a successful lawyer, but he can't forget Laura even if he wanted to. Too many people remember the case, and still think it’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it? The media are disinterring the case and a new investigating magistrate is reassessing the evidence.

Reluctantly, Robert agrees to help. But the only way he can establish his innocence is to find out the truth about Laura. And returning to St Quentin may disturb more than just the ghosts of the past.

"The book starts and ends in the Temple - London's legal district - but the rest is set in France: first Paris, then a semi-imaginary village in the limestone country of the Auvergne. I found writing about France almost as good as being there, and working professionally with French diplomats and national experts helped me enormously in sketching the police and judicial bureaucracies. Getting this right meant I could explore the isolation that anyone - even a lawyer - caught up in the legal machinery of a foreign country is going to experience. Meanwhile the setting in the deep countryside of France, away from the tourist areas, allows a touch of the Gothic to crteep in. There's a particularly nasty scene in a cavern..."