The Other Woman — Graham Thomas

Synopsis Abigail Hardwoode is content â€" the London Social Scene offers everything a seventeen-year-old girl could want. She has little concern for other people's problems, least of all those in France where great civil unrest threatens to erupt into bloody revolution… but while the oppressed masses rise up, a new insidious organisation emerges and it seems that Abigail's parents are incriminated. Only British secret agent Hilary Weaver believes the Hardwoodes to be innocent. Suddenly Abigail is pulled from her peaceful existence and thrust into the chaos of Revolutionary France on a mission with Hilary to clear the family name… but the call of the Revolution and the injustice she witnesses may be too powerful for Abigail to ignore. Extract "The prisoner Valois looked at his black fingernails and smirked with fond nostalgia. Only a few weeks earlier, the blackness was not grime but fresh ink from his printing press. He held his hands up to the solitary moonbeam in his cell and revelled in the work he had done before his arrest and subsequent incarceration. He smiled and felt righteous. The wounds on his back from the whippings and beatings administered by the gaoler De Launay did not hurt him. He looked at the grime, imagining it to be the ink on the seditious pamphlets he had printed. He smiled at the vitriol his words conjured in the local populous. He imagined the consequences of those words and he imagined the power of his work and the changing of the times. He felt a martyr and was not afraid of death. His only fear was that he would be kept captive for so long that the revolution would pass and he would not be alive or free to see the streets of Paris run blue with the blood of the King and his vile wife. Valois wanted to see his daughter Elise dance in that river of blue blood and he wanted to clap as she drank deeply and wantonly from it. The blood so blue it was almost black; black like the ink from his printing press hidden deep in the catacombs of Montmartre." ‘The Other Woman,' is book two of the ‘Roxy Compendium', an on-going series charting the trials and tribulations of a group of down-and-out artists and lovers in Regency London. Book One, 'Hats off to Brandenburg' is available now! "Graham Thomas is a definitely bringing his A-game where ever he goes. The shear amount of world building, creating each time a great set of characters and knowing how to write an unpredictable and amazing story really proves that he is one of my favourite authors out there. I hope to read much, much more of his works in the near future. Graham Thomas is a force to be reckoned with!" - The Book Plank review of The Other Woman