I am happy to announce that I have signed a book contract with Endeavour Press, Britain’s leading digital publisher to publish a Roman historical romance called Pilate’s Daughter. Pilate’s Daughter was written before the Poppy Denby series but had not yet found a home. The novel will be released before Easter 2017. Fans of Poppy Denby should not fear, however, as book 3 in the series will still be coming out in September 2017 and another one is in the pipeline for the following year!

Pilate’s Daughter is a Romeo and Juliet story set against the Roman occupation of Palestine in the first century. Claudia Lucretia Pilate, the daughter of the governor of Judea, falls in love with Judah ben Hillel, a young Jewish Zealot who has been tasked to kill her. But Claudia is promised to a dashing young Tribune whose job it is to rid Palestine of the Zealot problem, and to complicate matters further, is having an affair with a conniving slave who is set on getting rid of Claudia. In the meantime a Jewish prophet from Galilee has been stirring up trouble, claiming to be the long awaited Messiah. Judah is torn between following the prophet and eloping with Claudia and as the last days of Jesus come to a head in Jerusalem, so does the destiny of the ‘star-crossed lovers’. The lives of the lesser-known characters of the gospels rub shoulders with fictional characters in this historical Roman romance. The Pilates, the Herods, Barabbas, Caiphas and Judas Iscariot are shown not just as walk-on parts in the Jesus story, but as real people struggling to reconcile love and duty in one of the most volatile periods of history.