Thank you so much for inviting me onto your blog today, Andy. I am delighted to have a chance to tell you and your readers about Hunter’s Rules, the new novel in my series of The Edinburgh Crime Thrillers.
I've been writing and telling stories all my life. When I was a child, I used to make up stories for my little sister after our Mum put the light out and told us to go to sleep. Later, I wrote documents, contracts, and courses as part of my job, but my time was well accounted for, so I did not create any fiction.
However, I took early retirement when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and there were times when I suffered severe side effects from my treatment. I could not go out, spend time with friends or indulge in many of my favourite hobbies, but watching daytime television got very old very fast, so I turned to reading. It was the only thing I had the energy to do and could do safely.
I read voraciously, as I always have. I particularly enjoy reading crime fiction and thrillers. I indulged this interest with many novels including those by Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin, Linwood Barclay and Kathy Reichs.
After a while, I began to feel a little better and decided to start reviewing the books I read in a blog www.bookreviewstoday.info. I enjoyed doing that. Then, as I began to feel better still, I got restless, but was not well enough to do very much and I complained to my long-suffering husband about getting bored. It was then he challenged me: ‘If you know so much about what makes a good book, why don’t you write one?’ I did laugh. However, the challenge set, I have been writing police procedural crime thrillers set in Scotland ever since.
In fact, my publishers, will publish the sixth book in the series The Edinburgh Crime Mysteries on 01.01.2022. The main character is Detective Inspector Hunter Wilson, Hunter’s Rules.
I did two things with this novel that I have never done before: I don’t kill anybody in the book and the novel, Hunter’s Rules, actually has a prequel in my short story Cats and Dogs, which was published in a charity anthology of short stories, Dark Scotland, published in January 2021. Of course, both the novel and the short story can be read completely independently, but those who have read both may enjoy the conceit.
I particularly enjoyed writing Hunter’s Rules and hope that my readers will enjoy reading the novel. I plan that the next novel in this series will appear in 2023. It will be entitled Hunter’s Festival and will take place during an Edinburgh summer during the Edinburgh International Festival. I’ll let you know more about that in due course!
Thank you again for hosting me, Andy.
My pleasure, Val. I wish you all the best with Hunter's Rules in the new year.
The Edinburgh Crime Mysteries are available on Amazon: Hunter's Chase, Hunter's Revenge, Hunter's Force, Hunter's Blood, Hunter's Secret, Hunter's Rules.
Hunter’s Rules is the sixth book in Val Penny’s Edinburgh Crime Mysteries series of novels published by Dark Stroke, as is The First Cut, the first book in the new series of Jane Renwick Thrillers.
She has recently contributed her short story, Cats and Dogs to a charity anthology, Dark Scotland. Her short story, The Corpse in the Catacombs will be published in the charity anthology, Dark Paris, shortly.
Val is an American author living in SW Scotland with her husband and their cat.
