About Susanna M. Newstead

I have always told tales.

As a child I wrote little stories rooted in history and my teachers pestered me for the next instalment. I have always loved history especially the reign of King John 1199-1216. It's the beginning of our development as a nation) and so naturally anything I wrote was set in
those years.

I have studied the era and the social history for over 40 years.

I started writing the Savernake series as a young student of speech therapy in my 20s, writing it by hand in a small orange notebook in pre-computer days. I put it away in a drawer where it sat breathing quietly for over forty years.

Life and the need to pay the mortgage got in the way and when I changed professional direction and drifted into dementia research in Oxford, a very exacting and sometimes sad job,

I began to read historical murder mysteries as a distraction from its hardships. I found I quite liked them. Might I write them myself?

Then I got very ill and had to take early retirement. What was I to do with my time? The little orange notebook was dug out and Belvoir's Promise (my first book) became a murder mystery set in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, where I grew up. I spent a very long time researching and
one book led to another and so, the Savernake Novels were born.

Now I live quietly in a small town in Northamptonshire (soon to be moving back to Marlborough where many of my books are set) with my husband and a wire fox terrier called Tabor. We make regular forays into the woods of Savernake and have done a deal of research into the emerging town of Marlborough close by, a town which was beloved of King John and given its charter by him in 1204. Tabor does the groundwork....and I follow along, plotting dire murder!