I'm currently editing my novel Death in the Kingdom of Pines.
Death in the Kingdom of Pines is a murder mystery set in Chamonix 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 leaves 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. Can she find the truth and clear her name, before becoming the next victim herself? A fast-paced adventure culminates in a desperate struggle on the deadly ice of a Mont Blanc glacier.
Death in the Kingdom of Pines is the first novel in a trilogy following Marie-Laure and her friends – slippery ex-boyfriend Jean-Luc, ski champion Claudine and gendarme lieutenant Christophe – as Marie Laure’s wit and sharp intelligence make her an unlikely, but effective, investigator, trying to forge her own path in a time between two wars.
Read the first chapter here.