The End is Nigh!

It’s almost two years since I started writing Shadow of the Sphinx, but at long last the end is in sight. It’s now in the hands of my beta readers.

My editor returned my first draft last October, and I had just reached the stage of putting the final touches to a major rewrite ready to publish and launch the book onboard ship on my lecture cruise to the Baltic in December, but then real life took over!

Corrupted files meant I had to drop work on the novel and sort out my presentations for the cruise. The family descended on us for Christmas for a week as soon as we returned from the Baltic. Flu struck at the start of January rendering me helpless for six weeks both physically and mentally. (Which is why there was no February blog.) It’s only in the last couple of weeks that I’ve been to able polish off the script.

Here is the blurb:-

     Pyramids, pharaohs and a predator in Prada

 Eloise Masterton is the owner of a chain of high-end boutiques, and she doesn’t care who she steps on to build her empire. When she is         murdered on day one of a holiday tour of Egypt, there are plenty of suspects. Can Aunt Jessica and Harry unmask the murderer before their Nile cruise returns to Luxor and all the suspects leave the boat to go their separate ways?

An article in my writing magazine set me thinking about my protagonists. In Murder in Morocco, Harry is a troubled young man. It’s only when Aunt Jessica takes him in hand that he begins to develop a sense of confidence and self-worth. Shadow of the Sphinx is the fourth book in the series and Harry has matured considerably as time has gone on.

Though I had not appreciated it before, I realise all my protagonists share that same character trait – the determination to prove themselves despite a deep-seated lack of self-confidence. It’s true of Fiona, my coach tour manager, in the Fiona Mason Mysteries, and to a more limited extent of Amanda who feels overshadowed by her lecturer husband and is troubled by a sense of lack of purpose in her life now she has retired.

It’s important to me that my characters develop as each series continues but ultimately that creates a major problem. If overcoming that instinctive fear is what defines each character, what happens when they conquer their sense of inadequacy? Is that the natural end to the series?

That character trait is best illustrated in my very first published novel. In  All in the Mind, Sarah Harcourt may have climbed the career ladder to the top job in a man’s world, (a feat that was much more difficult to achieve twenty years ago when I wrote the book,) but behind the calm, efficient, capable manager image lurks the fear that one day the mask might slip, and all her insecurity revealed.