I trained as an actress at the Rose Bruford College but decided that my time would be better employed as a teacher, so for some years I taught drama and theatre arts. I have a First Class Honours B.Ed. from Liverpool University. Two of my most successful students are Christopher Luscombe, the well known director, and the best 007, Daniel Craig.

History has always been  one of my great interests. I achieved a distinction (equivalent to A*) in my history A Level when I was at school. I have always written and have done scripts for BBC Schools History Programmes in the days when such programmes existed. I had three thrillers published by Robert Hale in the 1980s and won the Historical Novel Society’s Kythira prize for a short story. I was inspired by Mary Renault with a fascination for Ancient Greece and spent several years producing a novel about the fall of Mycenae,  which was admired by a succession of agents and turned down by a succession of publishers, in spite of the fact that Louis de Bernieres pronounced it as ‘as good as Mary Renault’.  I eventually published it myself under the title THE LAST HERO.

When I retired from teaching I was at last able to concentrate on my career as a novelist. I  signed up to do an MA in creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University and graduated in 2000. This really opened doors for me and my first really successful novel was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 2005. WE’LL MEET AGAIN is set in World War ll and tells the story of a Liverpool girl who, through a chance encounter in an air raid shelter, is recruited into SOE, the Special Operations Executive. SOE was set up at the instigation of Winston Churchill to send agents into occupied countries to carry out sabotage and encourage resistance. It was so secret that even the top brass in the army did not know of its existence. This was the beginning of my ongoing interest in its activities, a topic I have revisited in numerous books.

My next novels, also published by Hodder, were a quartet also set in World War ll but inspired by the lives of my own parents. My father was a singer and my mother a dancer and they used to perform together in seaside summer shows. All this came to an end, of course, with the outbreak of war and my father went into the RAF, but I learned later that many of his fellow entertainers followed a different course and used their talents as part of the war effort by entertaining the troops. So the FOLLIES quartet, NOW IS THE HOUR, THEY ALSO SERVE, THEATRE OF WAR and THE FINAL ACT follow the varying experiences of four young people who are all part of the same seaside company at the outbreak of war.

After that I had the experience common to many authors of being dropped by my publisher and having to find a new home.  My researches for the earlier books had introduced me to the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Originally set up at the end of the 19th century as a corps of mounted nurses who would gallop onto the battle field to tend the wounded, by World War l they transmuted into the first women to drive ambulances under fire. This gave me the ideas for a trilogy of books,  published by Severn House as DAUGHTERS OF WAR, PASSIONS OF WAR AND HARVEST OF WAR .

I returned to World War ll to write OPERATION KINGFISHER, the story of a pair of teenagers trying escape from occupied France, which brought be back to publishers Robert Hale. A visit to Cyprus inspired APHRODITE’S ISLAND, set there at the time of the EOKA campaign to unite the island with Greece and expel the Turks. Then I decided to go back to an earlier interest in Medieval history and wrote TWICE ROYAL LADY, the story of Queen Matilda of England. John Hale greeted this with the complimentary exclamation that ‘this is how history ought to be written’. Sadly, Robert Hale closed down before the book received the promotion it deserved.

The next books were also set in the Middle Ages at the time of the First Crusade. IRONHAND and GOD’S WARRIOR eventually found publication with Sharpe Books.

I was then approached by  Ebury Press, a branch of Penguin Random House, for four novels set in the Victorian era to be published under the pen name Holly Green. These four books are set against the background of the Liverpool workhouse and tell the stories of four children who grew up in its grim environment.  Ebury then republished my World War l stories as the FRONTLINE NURSES trilogy, also under the name of Holly Green.

I returned to the subject of SOE and World War ll for a pair of thrillers, OPERATION LIGHTNING BOLT and OPERATION FORTITUDE, featuring agent Kim Maxwell and published by Joffe Books under my own name. I have just completed a trilogy of novels set in Yugoslavia at the same period and published by Hera Books under the Holly Green pseudonym. These stories gave me the opportunity to update readers on the later adventures of Leo and Sasha, the principal characters in the Frontline Nurses stories. The titles are A CALL TO COURAGE, A CALL TO SERVICE and A CALL TO HOME.

I am currently working on the third Kim Maxwell book. I am married and live on the Wirral.