WRITING AND BOOKS
Vicky has written for as long as she can remember. As a child she adored writing letters, and her love of reading soon prompted her to start writing stories. At school, college and university, she enjoyed writing essays. In her teens and twenties, she took courses in journalism and feature writing but never tried to get anything published. Her writing was always very psychological well before she studied the subject formally.
Vicky began a few novels while she was teaching but wasn’t sure what she wanted to write, and found it hard to fit much else round a full-time job. It was when she read Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and Little Face by Sophie Hannah that she saw a way to use fiction to explore the psychology of violence, and this decided her on the crime fiction genre. She completed her first crime novel in 2013 when she was doing her creative writing MA and began her second (which became Turn a Blind Eye) for her dissertation project in 2014.
The DI Rahman series
Published by HQ/HarperCollins, this is a contemporary police procedural series which is set in the Tower Hamlets borough of East London. It begins with Turn a Blind Eye (2018) and is followed with Out of the Ashes (2019). The series combines the mystery and investigation elements of a traditional procedural with an exploration of life in this part of London. DI Maya Rahman is a British Bangladeshi, whose family came to the UK in 1982 and settled in Brick Lane. When the book opens, DS Dan Maguire has just joined Maya’s CID team as a fast-track officer from Australia. Vicky drew on her experience of living and working in East London, and visiting Australia twice, to develop the characters in Turn a Blind Eye. She built the plot from real life events that she heard and read about, and ones she witnessed. All of these have been modified and fictionalised.
The Wootton Windmill Mysteries
This is a cozy mystery series set in a fictional village called Lower Wootton in Kent, in the area between Deal and Dover. The main character is Ellie Blix who is a busy mum who has lived in Wootton all her life.
The first in the series, Murder at the Christmas Carols, was published on 21st November 2022 and quickly reached the top 100 kindle chart on Amazon. It’s currently in the top 300. The second book will be out in the spring of 2023.
This is the blurb:
A dead carol singer. Three women sleuths. Not your average village Christmas.
All Ellie Blix wants is to make it to New Year without any more disasters. She's juggling jobs and looking after a sick daughter. Then her mother-in-law moves in and won’t stop interfering.
It’s the week before Christmas in the snowy village of Lower Wootton. When Andrea Burdett, Ellie's estranged schoolfriend, collapses at the village carols, it quickly becomes clear she’s been murdered. Feeling guilty about the recent row she and Andrea had, and under suspicion herself, Ellie teams up with her daughter and mother-in-law to follow the clues and solve the mystery - much to the annoyance of Ellie's detective inspector ex-husband.
Then a second villager is found dead. Can the three Blix women find the killer and return the community to safety?
This series came about like this …
When Vicky was growing up, she adored reading Enid Blyton. The books were great fun and she longed to climb through the pages and join the characters on their adventures. She quickly moved onto Agatha Christie. When she was studying for my French A-level, she read Georges Simenon. With Christie and Simenon, it wasn't about the adventure. It was about the puzzle and the detection. All three authors set off a lifelong love affair with mysteries. She has continued to read them prolifically – and adores writing them.
During the COVID pandemic and associated lockdowns, Vicky found herself wanting to write stories which were lighter in tone than her previous gritty, urban police procedurals. She didn't want to write gory corpse scenes, or go into detail about murder methods and forensics. She wanted to write about a community where people cared about each other. She wanted to write stories which featured warmth, humour and friendship more prominently. And she wanted to write about characters who aren't constrained by police procedures. Characters who can get away with the things that detectives cannot.
This is where she got the idea for the Wootton Windmill Mysteries. She moved house during one of the UK lockdowns and across the fields from where she lives in Kent is a ‘smock’ windmill. If you look on her social media, you’ll see some photos of it. Vicky kept thinking about what an amazing home it would be for her main character, Ellie Blix. Ripple Windmill isn't converted into a home. It's been lovingly restored by the owners to a working mill. No longer in use, except for open days. In the series, Vicky has moved the mill, and many other local landmarks, to create her fictional village of Lower Wootton.
Ripple Windmill, which is the inspiration for the home of the Blix women.
REVIEWS
'Izzie Harper has created the perfect cozy read - set in an idyllic village, with an intriguing mystery which the reader can sink their teeth into. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to see how the Blix women were going to solve this!' - Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me.
'Warm, clever and charming, with a compelling mystery at its heart.' - Roz Watkins, author of The Devil's Dice.
Reviews from Amazon
‘… an enjoyable read which made me stay up into the early hours.’
‘I was looking for a Christmas mystery and couldn’t have made a better choice. I really couldn’t put it down. The village and its characters became so real and I was totally invested in them.’
‘Believable characters with complex relationships, plot twists galore and cliff hanger chapter endings made this cosy crime a compulsive page turner.’
‘Great story , well told with well developed characters and a convincing plot line.’
‘I loved the final chapter, as it is authentically human, not too tidy and leaves room for potential that hopefully will be continued in book 2.’
