Sally Spedding was born by the sea near Porthcawl and studied Sculpture at Manchester and St. Martin’s, London. While an exhibiting artist and full-time teacher, she won an international short story competition and was approached by an agent. Wringland, set in haunted Fen country, was published in 2001. Sally is also twice winner of the international Welsh Poetry Competition.


A Flock Of Sleep

Guiseppe Verdi’s pleading Requiem Mass opens this chilling account of a secondary school party from Oakwood Comprehensive School in Lincolnshire who, on Monday October 7th with several optimistic teachers, especially Suzanne Priscilla Price, youthful Head of Modern Languages, eagerly display Tour-Ed’s vivid posters promoting next year’s Whitsun trip to Carcassonne and its historic surroundings.

Little do they realise what lies in store…

Once there, it’s no easy task keeping everyone in sight in such a particularly strange and eerily historic area where little English is spoken, and often unreported dark deeds have proliferated for years.

Of course, Suzanne with a birthday looming, and her colleagues do their best to keep that lively, often disobedient flock on the straight and narrow, but how can any of them know what lies in wait in that gloomy, unsettling Tower of Justice?

Read and be chilled….


Bloodstream

It’s 1985 and a fine early summer in the north-eastern French province of Lorraine, when sixteen year-old Pauline Archibald, only child of a schoolteacher and librarian from Manchester, arrives at the run-down ‘Les Sapins‘ as an ‘au pair‘ to failing businessman Olivier Vincente, his depressed wife Renée and their two younger teenage children, Nicolas and Solange.

Pauline soon senses a growing malaise in the air, and it’s not long before her own life is turned upside down by risky temptations and an aristocratic, infertile woman whose ruthlessness knows no bounds. Wife of Jean-Marie, a successful lawyer and also Olivier’s twin brother, she has her own dark, malevolent agenda.

Can Pauline survive such a worsening and dangerous situation, or will she decide to head for home?

Only time will tell, and time is fast running out.


White Meat

The third in the DC Martin Webb trilogy.

If you think Burke and Hare are part of history, think again.

In the Australian winter of 2006, twenty-eight year-old ex-pat Chris Mears, haunted by the mysterious death of his baby brother, is worth more dead than alive. Disease-free and still relatively young, he’s been lured from his IT workplace in Brisbane by sexy colleague, Angelica Wood, to a remote island where danger and death lurk amongst the sand dunes. Will best friend DI Martin Webb in Malvern, reach him and other victims in time, and at what cost to his partner and young daughter left at home? To what lengths will Caritas, a global funeral company, go to keep their evil chapels of unrest a secret?

Bone and tissue theft for the British market is still big business. However, for one deranged, manipulative man on the other side of the world, reclaiming a particular heart is his main mission. But even if Martin survives, could he and his family be in the greatest danger? Their lives changed forever because nowhere is safe…

Be sure to keep the light on!


Fin Du Monde

The final Delphine Rougier investigation.

It’s Saturday, 6th November 2010 in the popular Pyrenean tourist town of Orne-les Bains on a wet, wind-blown morning, the pregnant Lieutenant Delphine Rougier, now married to Lieutenant-Colonel Alonso Diaz and on maternity leave, is out shopping when she suddenly receives a shocking phone call from an anonymous caller. Whether male or female is impossible to tell. This stops her in her tracks.

‘Whore, bitch, slag!’ that voice snarls, followed by a terrible threat that her baby will die, foreshadowing months of fear and anguish delivered by other so-far unknown predators. But why? And above all, who?

What in her past could have triggered such vileness? And what will the consequences be for both her, Alonso and their beautiful new daughter Rose, named after a generous, elderly benefactor who’d later drowned herself in the River Sarthe? As one crisis leads to another, who will live and who will die in those stunning surroundings where that huge, holy but treacherous Pic de Canigou reigns over all?


Fatal

The fourth Delphine Rougier investigation.

In France’s spectacular and historic Ariège department, terror still lurks amongst its beauty. Where a shocking secret concerning young French citizens from Réunion, its distant colony, ostensibly sent to help re-populate that and other parts of France, waits to be uncovered.

Little did those innocent victims realise their intended fate. Only years later, on Monday 9th August 2010, after one of them, Maurice Doucet, now aged forty-one, employed by a boulangerie in La Chapelle-de-la-Sarthe to deliver early morning baguettes to its customers, is deliberately killed while cycling through a deliberately treacherous oil spillage, other wickedness comes to light.

Will newly-promoted Delphine Rougier and fellow Lieutenant Alonso Diaz, navigating his way through a tricky relationship with his fiancée, together with their boss Colonel Serge Valon with whom she’d enjoyed a more than close friendship, uncover this toxic nest of vipers? Or will more personal matters take their toll?

Seismic tremors from Delphine’s dogged, often single-handed investigations trigger certain events to change her life forever. Can she, Diaz and their boss survive? And will justice ever be done for all those who suffered harm?

Read and be chilled…


Blood At Beltane

It’s June 2007 when Welsh poet and lecturer Ifor Griffiths gets news that he’s to receive a prestigious Bursary enabling him to further research and translate the poetry of the late, hermitic Gaspard Lecroix, from the Sarthe department in France.

Normally, this would be thrilling news, but it comes freighted with danger, not least from his mean-spirited partner, Menna Edwards with whom he has a young son, Arthur. Ifor is guarding a potentially risky secret, having fallen in love with a beautiful, young Muslim woman whom he’d met in Le Mans the previous year. A woman with powerful connections and a secret agenda of which he knows nothing.

Meanwhile, sous-lieutenant Delphine Rougier has encountered the truly bizarre Athène Lardin at her rundown farmhouse, where many almost dead birds lie twitching in agony. But why? And what is this bitter, bizarre woman’s real agenda? Who is the surly man she seems to be related to? And as the days pass, with ever more unforeseen and shocking events causing fear and tension at the Labradelle gendarmerie, will Delphine and her boss, Colonel Valon, with whom she is having a relationship, be able to prevent further tragedy and eventually find happiness?

Or will Lardin with her obsessive agendas prevail? And the poet Ifor Griffiths who’s inadvertently stepped into a death-trap, ever see his young son again?

Only Walpurgis Night will reveal the truth.


Office For The Dead

The second in the DC Martin Webb trilogy.

DC Martin Webb is helping his widowed father move on from prison to a new life, when he learns of an apparently motiveless shooting of a local crane driver at Portsmouth Docks.  Why was that man shot, and why did one of the crates destined for France, contain the headless, handless body of a naked young man with a Pater Noster rosary bead in his rectum?

French-speaking Martin is sent to investigate and soon becomes embroiled in an ever-darkening web of secrecy and terror. Could that butchered victim be connected to a secretive Seminary tucked away amongst vineyards and sunflowers in a remote part of the Aude? Martin must discover who really was the victim in that crate? And why?  Who might be next? And with yet more horrors to come, can his and Dora’s love prove strong enough to survive?


The Devil’s Garden

Delphine Rougier, while training to become a gendarme in the Corrèze, witnesses a middle-aged couple emptying a suspicious-looking liquid into a nearby stream. It’s poison. But why? The couple vanish and Delphine finds their car a burnt-out wreck. Also, their farm’s cows have been savaged by wolves previously unseen in the region. There are more questions than answers.

Meanwhile, her mother’s killer, Patrick Gauffroi, has been sprung from a Paris jail. Who helped him escape, and why? Is he now stalking Delphine? She becomes stretched on more than one front. Friends become enemies. But Delphine is determined to uncover the truth, in relation to both her investigation and Gauffroi’s true nature. Even at the risk of losing everything, Including her life.


Downfall

Retired farmer, François Rougier, is creating a shrine near his dilapidated farm in the Sarthe, when his wife tells him they have received another threatening letter. The letter is worse than the last. Both know why. But they must at all cost keep their secrets hidden from their daughter. Delphine Rougier, who owns ambitions of becoming a gendarme, works as a chambermaid in a hotel near Le Mans.

One morning Delphine discovers a new-born baby boy, left in one of the rooms. Dead. Delphine soon begins her own investigation into the horrific crime – and uncovers not only corruption within the local gendarmerie but also a disturbing event involving her father in 1968. Secrets and enemies are unleashed. Delphine and her parents are plunged into grave danger, becoming the target for a ruthless assassin. Justice must be done. But whose justice?


The Nighthawk

France, early April 1986 and fifty-four-year-old John Lyon, newly retired Detective Inspector from Nottingham, breaks his journey in the eastern Pyrenees where he stumbles across a strange, half-hidden house and an intriguing name on its letter box.This attractive, wheelchair-bound woman with a new name and nationality, soon draws him into her world shaped by a tragic past. As that past catches up and enemies draw closer, who is lying? Who tells the truth? Who has most to lose?But John has fallen in love and is also a target.

Only La Chasse, a hunt to the death in wild scrubland, where loyal Frenchmen have also entered the night. Where shocking truths will be revealed, and blood will be shed. The Nighthawk is a dark, enthralling thriller that grips from start to finish. Recommended for fans of Gillian Flynn, Bernard Minier and Manda Scott.


Behold A Pale Horse

This literary thriller mainly set in London and the south of France, draws upon parallels of evil through the ages.

From 1271-1310 after the purging of the Knights Templar in 1307 and the round-up and torture of homosexuals from the French Riviera during World War II, to 1983 and young Catherine and Clement Ash’s loveless marriage.

It also charts one deranged old man’s unfinished business leading to a different, even more deadly Apocalypse.


tyc_175_250The Yellowhammer’s Cradle

According to ancient folklore in Scotland and northen England, the yellowhammer bird is said to drink a drop of the Devil’s blood every May Day morning, but for pretty, young, Catriona McPhee in rural Argyll in 1846, this mere titbit will never satisfy her dark soul.

From the day she arrives to work as a maid at Ardnasaig House on the bleak shores of Loch Nonach during the time of the Clearances, she brings a growing fear to those already there. Yet nothing – not even her shocking secret – will dent her ambition.

However, Janet Lennox, the housekeeper’s plain, less-educated daughter, harbouring her own tragedy, has other ideas, and soon a dance to the death begins. As winter chills the vast rooms and freezes the bottomless Loch Nonach, who, within that haunted, granite prison, will live, and who will die?


cuttothebone_cover_175_250Cut To The Bone

WHERE NO-ONE IS SAFE… In 2008, when Rita Martin’s feckless husband leaves her and their three children to fend for themselves, her secure world is turned upside down.

When they have to move to Coventry’s Scrub End estate, her every worst fear is realised. Yet how can she possibly know that her eldest son’s best friend from a nearby luxury development has only evil in mind? A teenage boy with, it seems, everything, yet damaged and dangerous like the very area itself.

And will DI Tim Fraser believe Rita enough to help protect her family and bring a killer to justice?

CUT TO THE BONE is a dark, psychological chiller, set in troubled times. You will be left unsure whom to trust and wondering when all else fails, if even love is enough.


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