Murder on Mont Blanc
Murder on Mont Blanc is set in the fictional (sort of...) town of Chamoix-sur-Arve in 1931, when the newly fashionable sport of skiing is bringing excitement, money and glamour to the French Alps.
Young Irishwoman Marie-Laure Monaghan has come to France to start a new life and leave behind a past scarred by civil war. Keen to find adventure, she quits her job as a convent school teacher to become a ski instructor. But her hopes for the future are turned upside down when she finds her first pupil lying dead in the snow with a ski pole through his neck. She is sure it was no accident, but no-one is listening to her.
Blamed for his death and sacked from her job, she is thrown a lifeline by a rich industrialist, her dead pupil’s employer, who hires her to chaperone his wife and daughter. A series of attacks convince her that the family is threatened, and that their secrets are putting her own life in danger. The adventure culminates in a desperate struggle on the deadly ice of a Mont Blanc glacier.
For me, writing Murder on Mont Blanc has been a long process, but an enjoyable one, as I got to know Marie-Laure and her friends: slippery ex-boyfriend Jean-Luc, ski champion Claudine, gendarme lieutenant Christophe and landlady Nathalie. Their stories will continue in the forthcoming books as they try to forge their paths in a time that was offering the promise of modernity, and more freedom for women, but which was also - unknown to them - leading inexorably towards another war.
Writing the novel has also given me the opportunity to delve into the history and geography of a part of France where I have spent a lot of my life, and I hope the book will convey my deep love of the Alps. Trying to work out how people skied in the early years of that sport was quite a challenge - things were very different from today! I'm also fascinated by the glamour of the 1930s - the age of Chanel and jazz, and also of course, of classic Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Throughout the writing of this book I've had a huge amount of support and valuable feedback from friends and my fellow writers in Hertford Writers' Circle and my thank-you to them in the acknowledgements is heartfelt. It's also been a delight to work with independent publishers The Endless Bookcase, who are a small team but highly knowledgeable and hardworking.
