Beneath the Tor out in Kindle!

At last! The three books in the Shaman Mystery Mystery series are out in both Kindle and paperback editions. The third in the series,  Beneath the Tor, is now available from Amazon. The Kindle edition is only 99p and if you're with Kindle Unlimited, it's free to download. 

Now I'll be able to concentrate on seeing the fourth in the series through production and into both Kindle and paperback editions. Through the Floodgate, should be released in the early spring of 2021. 

The original idea of the Shaman Mystery Series, came to me one day, in the guise of Sabbbie Dare. She arrived, fully-formed and said;  'I'm a young therapist, a shaman, and sometimes I do get very strange people walking into my therapy room. Honestly, I could write a book about some of them...'

And so the idea for the first in the series, In the Moors,

was born.

I'm not at all like Sabbie; I can't add up, I doubt I could solve a murder mystery, and I'm not quite the 'cock-eye' optimist that she is. I'm far, far, shyer than Sabbie, who says it just like it is, and is unafraid of catching people off-guard. Sabbie is a very curious person and as she says herself..."you know what that did to the cat."

But like Sabbie, I follow a pagan path which takes me close to the earth and into the deep recesses of my mind. Shamanic techniques help me in my life - in fact they changed my life - although, unlike Sabbie, I’ve never set up a therapeutic practice...I’m too busy writing!  

Beneath the Tor had its seeds in my visits, over the years, to the town of Glastonbury. I have become firm friends with many of the people who not only live there, but use it as a sacred and spiritual base for their work. But I also can't help but think that there is a dark side to the town. Naturally, one has to made a living if one offers spiritual therapies, but in the past, I have met those who are not all they're letting on, and some who have been making a profit without really knowing what damage they might do.

Nevertheless, there are good points to the town. The sacred and the pagan do exist side-by-side, with the beauty of the Abbey and the lovely church central to the community, and the mysteries of the Chalice Well and Tor deep in its psyche. I wanted to include both these sides to Glastonbury, and celebrate it, as well as set a thrilling crime mystery there.

To get this book right, I spoke to a lot of people and read a lot of books. I should thank the generosity of Nicholas Mann, whose wide breathe of knowledge on Glastonbury was my foundation stone, especially his book The Isle of Avalon:

Mara Freeman on Glastonbury Tor

Sacred Mysteries of Arthur and Glastonbury, published by Green Magic, and Glastonbury Tor: A Guide to the History and Legends. Also by my side as I wrote was Grail Alchemy, Initiation in the Celtic Mystery Tradition  by Mara Freeman, an authority on the mysteries surrounding the Isle of Avalon. She had just finished writing  at the time I was completing Beneath the Tor. It's an inspirational book I recommend here. Of the series, Mara says…"A real page-turner, In the Moors cost me several hours of sleep because it was so un-put-downable! An engaging heroine, a landscape at once so real and so menacing, and an intriguing mystery had me enthralled into the wee hours!” 

Some of you may remember the launch of Beneath the Tor at the The Avalon Room in Glastonbury. 50 people gathered and it was a blast; everyone had a great time, there was standing room only, and as one attendee said on facebook…Ronald Hutton...Arthur ‘ZZ Birmingham’ on guitar...and chocolates!

While Arthur wowed us with the blues, Ronald Hutton, professor of history at Bristol University and a world authority on paganism, gave a talk on the history of shamanism, concentrating on how it arrived in the West and was taken up and made obtainable by the great exponents in this country and the US especially. He then very cleverly (well, he is clever!) explained how my books tapped this seam, explaining how readers nowadays like two particular genres of novel; crime fiction and fantastic fiction. By entering Sabbie Dare’s two worlds…as a 30 year old woman faced with dilemmas, worries and, sometimes, danger in the 'apparent world' – and her amazing journeys into the spirit world as a shaman, I had successfully blended the two. Thank you, Ronald, and thank you, too, for your kind review of the book...." Milton 

has become a mistress of plot-weaving, and above all, she pulls off the trick of setting the totally fantastic amid the totally everyday and making the two fit together with pace and excitement."

So, I hear you cry, what is the third Shaman Mystery about? Well, let's have a taster; 

…A handful of dancers were still going strong. Alys was among them, turboed up like a child who’d had too much ice cream, hollering and whooping, I could hear her from the far side of the summit.

    I saw her dance.

    I saw her drop.

    She fell to the ground without a stumble or a cry.

    She fell awkwardly, one leg trapped under the other, her head thrown back.

    I stared for long seconds, waiting for her to rise.

    Alys didn’t get up. She didn’t move at all 

One Midsummer Eve on Glastonbury Tor, beautiful Alys Hollingberry dies suddenly after dancing through the night. After receiving sinister, anonymous emails about Alys, her grieving husband Brice approaches therapeutic shaman, Sabbie Dare. She turns to the spirit world for guidance but receives only conflicting and enigmatic answers. Meanwhile she follows the links from Alys to a killer who attacks in public yet seems to disappear at will. She must find the murderer before someone she knows becomes the next victim.

You can get a copy of Beneath the Tor HERE!