Summer is the season to get outdoors and indulge in your favourite pastime, whether it’s tennis, golf, cycling, hiking, or just relaxing in the garden with a good book. Marion Leigh, author of the Petra Minx adventure thrillers, spends the summer boating, a passion she shares with her feisty young protagonist Petra Minx.

Petra, a Marine Unit Sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, loves the water. In The Politician’s Daughter, she works with RCMP Liaison Officer, Tom Gilmore, to set up her cover before joining megayacht Titania as a hostess in a bid to find the missing Emily Mortlake. Not surprisingly, when Tom asks her for a code word, she picks her favourite boat, a Lazzara 84 motor yacht.

When Petra goes to the Bahamas in Continue Reading »

Congratulations to the winners of the W4W 2016 Independent Author Book Award. Entries were judged by Felicity Trew of the Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency and the results announced in June.

Marion Leigh’s adventure thrillers featuring Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Petra Minx didn’t make the top three, but they did garner two commendations: Dead Man’s Legacy was Highly Commended and The Politician’s Daughter, Commended. 

Interestingly, the first and second prizes were awarded for non-fiction: From Both Ends of the Stethoscope by Dr. Kathleen Thompson, and The Man Who Didn’t Go to Newcastle by Alison Clink. Third place went to The Secret of Skara Vhore by Jennifer M. Calder, the first novel...

Remember precis-writing in school? How you had to read a text then summarize it, keeping all the main facts but stripping out the detail? Not easy to do, even on a text of a hundred and fifty words.

So how do you summarize a full-length novel of 80,000 to 100,000 words? Literary agents and publishers typically ask for a 500 or 1,000 word synopsis. Do you write it first or after the novel? Apparently the late great Sidney Sheldon was never sure where his plot was going until he’d finished writing.

Marion Leigh has done it both ways. For The Politician’s Daughter, her debut novel featuring Marine Unit Sergeant Petra Minx of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Marion wrote a chapter plan for the first two-thirds of the novel then followed her nose to the end...

33 years ago, on May 19, 1983, a 3-month old raccoon climbed more than halfway up the South Tower of the Royal Bank Plaza, then the tallest skyscraper in Toronto, Canada. According to next day’s Montreal Gazette, the crowd that gathered nicknamed the raccoon “Ricky” and watched him climb the outside of the iconic gold building to the 23rd floor. People let out a cheer as he climbed onto the window washing scaffold that had been lowered from the roof to rescue him.

Living in Toronto at that time, Marion Leigh was fascinated by the raccoon’s exploit and thought it would make a good tale for children. She dashed off a short story about Ricky, called The Expedition. This languished in a drawer for over two decades until Marion had time to think seriously about writing.

After publishing The Politician’s Daughter, the first adventure thriller...

Where better to view the Monaco Grand Prix than from the deck of a megayacht? Imagine the Formula 1 cars shooting past the stern of the boat 78 times. Race dates for 2016 are May 26 – 29. Don León, the charismatic anti-hero of The Politician’s Daughter, Marion Leigh’s first adventure thriller, would surely be there on Titania, his 70-metre blue-hulled beauty if he could. For the occasion, he would no doubt move his incandescent orange Lamborghini Murciélago from its usual position on the aft deck. Maybe he would even get to try out the circuit through his connections to the rich and famous.

In Marion Leigh’s novel, RCMP Marine Unit Sergeant Petra Minx battles to find Emily Mortlake, the politician’s daughter who has disappeared after taking a hostess job on board Titania. Petra joins Don León’s yacht in Monaco to begin her quest. She loves boats...

After the excitement of the London Book Fair, we move into Shakespeare Week and continue to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death on April 23, 1616. According to history.com, Shakespeare wrote about a million words over 20 years. By my calculation, that represents fifty thousand words per annum, or half the length of a modern novel. Many writers produce far more than that each year, but they are simply not in the same league as Shakespeare. 

Growing up in Birmingham, England, I was not far away from Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, and loved it from my first visit. I still remember exploring Anne Hathaway’s thatched cottage, which looked just as it did in one of my jigsaw puzzles. In my late teens, I often went to Stratford with a friend to spend the weekend at the youth hostel there. We would queue for last-minute tickets...

As a writer, I am constantly filing away snippets of information to use in my novels, and as a boater, I read lots of boating magazines. So when I came across an article on the Indo-Pacific lionfish in BoatU.S. Magazine, I tore it out for future reference. Until then, I had never heard of this venomous and potentially deadly fish that has spread into the Caribbean and U.S. Atlantic coast waters.

In the Bahamian segment of Dead Man’s Legacy, Petra Minx spends a day aboard Betty Graceby’s classic motor yacht getting to know the legendary diva and her dysfunctional family. I needed something to add drama to the end of that scene and remembered the article, so I pulled it out of my bulky folder and wrote the lionfish into the story:

‘They have red and white stripes like some exotic zebra, and venomous spines,’...

From 12 - 14 April, Olympia London will play host to more than 25,000 attendees representing 124 countries. The London Book Fair is the largest global marketplace for rights negotiation and a place where eye-popping deals are struck. This year’s slogan “Making Words Go Further” captures the essence of the wheeling and dealing that serves to bring books out of relative obscurity to huge audiences. 

It’s frenetic and addictive: a three-day marathon and an adrenaline high. I know because I was there in 2012 and 2013, pounding the floorboards of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, then the venue for the celebrated event. Roaming therapists offer quickie shoulder massages and nothing is more welcome than the end-of-day cocktails offered by some of the big publishers.

Transiting through Toronto recently, I took a few photos of the bleak, grey, snowy landscape from the airport hotel. Toronto is a great city, but I’d rather spend the winter months elsewhere. I thrive on warmth, sunshine and being on or near water, whereas the protagonist of my adventure thrillers, Petra Minx, loves the snow almost as much as she loves the water!

When Petra Minx is at home, and not on an overseas mission to render assistance to Canadians in trouble, she takes up her normal duties as a Marine Unit Sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Dead Man’s Legacy, Petra’s second adventure, gives readers an insight into these duties.

After flying to the Bahamas to meet the ageing Canadian diva Betty Graceby and her dysfunctional family, Petra rejoins her unit in November with mixed...

Over the past few months, I’ve been working to give my website a new look. This was precipitated by the publication last year of Dead Man’s Legacy and the need to have a site that could be updated easily. My blog is now also part of the website.

The site focusses on my Petra Minx series of adventure thrillers: The Politician’s Daughter and Dead Man’s Legacy. The books can be read in any order, however I recommend starting with The Politician's Daughter, where key characters are introduced, many of whom reappear in book two. These include Petra’s quirky boss A.K., her mentor in London, RCMP Liaison Officer Tom Gilmore, and her Italian friend Carlo who works for Interpol. 

The third book in the series, which takes Petra to South Africa to attend Carlo’s cousin’s wedding, is beginning to come alive. Not surprisingly, the working title is Destination Wedding. My objective is...