In yet more personal excitement about my murder mystery “Blinded by Our Eyes” being OUT THERE at Carina (and I’ll continue to be shameless about the BUY link *lol*), I’d like to share how grateful and excited I am to be at Carina, and how precious the book  is to me.

Yes, everyone says, they ALL are .

So indulge me!

I’ve lived in and around London all my adult life.  It’s a vibrant, gritty, shocking, exciting, startling, heartening, frightening, welcoming city – all mixed in together!

But I didn’t start writing for public consumption in the UK.  I mean *I* was there, personally, but my fiction wasn’t.  Like many male/male writers, I came from a fanfiction background. I’d always written original stories as well - and my (unpublished) 300k words Bodice Ripper set in 18th century Devon, England is a testament to that! – but fanfiction was my first real exposure to writing for an audience. I LOVED IT! *lol* But that audience was mainly in North America, or was used to US vocabulary. The series I was a fan of (Gundam Wing), although a Japanese anime, was broadcast on US channels.  So although I usually avoided any specific mention of location, and I didn’t really write in what they ‘canon’ (i.e. the actual setting of the original series),  it seemed right to keep my stories about the guys in a US setting.

Then I took the plunge into original publishing in 2007. Pressed that SEND button to a publisher and held my breath, for a story I wrote during NaNoWriMo. Then, after I turned blue after a week (LOL) -  and had to press SEND a few more times, in a few more places! – I had my first novel published in 2008, The Gold Warrior.  It was set in a fantasy world.

Still not really in my home country!

It took until 2009 to offer a book for publication that was set in the UK, Freeman.  Still a m/m romance, but with a grittier feel, with more of the British humour and – blessedly – British spellings . I didn’t have to worry about confusing trousers and pants, apartments and flats, pavements and sidewalks. And I kept that “U” in words like colour and favour that we Brits are so territorial about LOL.

And guess what? When I submitted Blinded by Our Eyes to Carina, I tried again.  London setting, London, people, London language…

And they accepted it!  Despite being a US publisher, I’ve been allowed to tell my story in the place and context it was written.  I can understand that a book has to be intelligible to its audience, that they want to connect with the characters, feel they’re involved in the locations.  But it’s a real joy to be able to share London with readers – and I hope they’ll all love it as much as I do.

THAT’S what’s so precious .

Please read my other post for the excerpt. And come and visit Carina’s site for great fiction of all genres.

You can find my own website and other networks (links below).  I have free fiction for visitors at the website, and news of all my other books, whether published or struggling to hold their head up in my ever-growing, often-neglected work-in-progress pile.

Happy Reading!

Clare London, Author
Writing… Man to Man

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My murder mystery “Blinded by Our Eyes” is now OUT THERE at Carina! Terrifying and thrilling, all in one big ball of Author Excitement LOL.

“Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.”
Octave Mirbeau 1948-1917

This quote is presumably as true today as it ever was – and that’s the basis of my book.  I was intrigued by the interplay of love, passion, hate, obsession, devotion, deceit … and murder.

Who wouldn’t be? LOL

This is my first real murder mystery, though I’ve written mystery as a sub-plot to romance in the past. And I have to confess it’s no Agatha Christie or Perry Mason! I read a lot of thrillers and crime novels but I didn’t want to write a book with cops and robbers, or a Jason Bourne-type hero.  It’s just a little too removed from my personal experience to write with confidence! So maybe the theme was never to find out who-dunnit, but WHY-dunnit.

My hero, Charles Garrett reacts as many of us would do, in the face of murder close at hand.  He’s shocked and horrified, but also spurred on to investigate how and why it could have happened. And when he does, he starts to discover the hidden motivation and desires behind many of the people he thought he knew as friends – and much closer than that.  To date, he’s devoted his life to finding and nurturing beauty, but murder forces ugliness and pain into his previously well-ordered life.

“Clare London’s passionate m/m mystery Blinded by Our Eyes isn’t structured like a traditional whodunit, focusing instead on the psychological aspects of love and murder.” That’s the beautiful summary of my treasured editor, Deborah Nemeth.

Here’s the official blurb:
London art dealer Charles Garrett has devoted his life to appreciating and acquiring beauty, both in art and in his companions. His fashionable life is rocked to the core when he discovers the body of a young artist, Paolo Valero, in a pool of blood in his gallery.

As Paolo’s mentor, Charles is haunted by the horror of his violent death. Seeking closure, he investigates Paolo’s past and soon discovers a tangled web of motives and potential suspects, some closer to home than he ever imagined. He’s drawn to Antony Walker, an aggressive, handsome sculptor with unsavory ties to Paolo. Charles is unsettled by Antony’s forceful nature but irresistibly attracted to his passion and his art.

When the evidence points toward Antony’s guilt, Charles is thrown into emotional turmoil. Has he lost his heart to a killer?

The opening scene is previewed below. In another post, I’ll talk about where the book is set and why it’s special to me, and why I’ve been so happy for my book to find its home with Carina.

The book also starts with another quote, from one of my favourite poets, Rupert Brooke.  It struck a chord because the story is all about the power of perception, of genuinely ”seeing, no longer blinded by our eyes”. Charles has a talent for recognising and appreciating beauty, but the murder shocks him out of his complacency and makes him realize he’s got to look beneath that, to find what passion – and love – is really about.  Gradually, he discovers that what he really wants isn’t necessarily beauty but truth – and he has a talent for finding that, too.

It’s not an easy path, and his discoveries are both confusing and painful at times. But they’re the only ones that are both real and rewarding.

Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
Rupert Brooke

EXCERPT:
The sound of a man crying was the first shock. Deep, racking sobs echoing off the smooth walls of my showroom. The whole gallery was usually deserted and cool at this late hour, despite the urban truth that London never slept. Yet tonight something in the air resonated with tension. And huddled in the far corner was a slender, pale young man. Arms clenched around his drawn-up knees, his eyes hot and wet, staring at me through a fringe of bedraggled dark curls. He looked angry and scared, and for the first few seconds it was all directed at me.

Without thinking, I dropped my bag. I heard the thump as it hit the floor.

I’d never seen anyone who wasn’t a woman cry like this. The sound was strange, astonishingly loud and ugly, his breath rasping with each hiccup of anguish. His shoulders rose and fell awkwardly, the bones a shadowy silhouette under the thin fabric of his shirt, his knuckles white against the black fabric of his jeans.

How beautiful he still looked, how miserable yet how utterly fascinating. My thoughts disgusted me, yet at the same time I couldn’t deny them. As I stared back at him, the aggression in his eyes started to fade. Hope glinted there in its place.

Then I registered the blood on the floor around him. How the hell could I miss it? So much blood. It ran along the base of the far wall and pooled out over the floor, a shocking, plum-red stain on the pale wood. It was thick and unnaturally still, an occasional patch of it glistening under the dimmed overhead lights. Coagulated; no longer flowing. I had no idea how long ago it’d been fresh. The residue puddled around his bare feet and under his legs and arse, then slithered along the edge of the wall again, diverting around the base of a display case. I barely glanced at the case. It stood upright, but crooked as if broken, and the objects inside had been knocked over.

I just stared at the blood. Funny how these things strike you when you’re in shock; it was only after I noticed the mess that the smell hit me. Thick and putrid, seeping into my throat, daring me to gag. Why didn’t blood smell like this domestically? When I cut my hand, when I sliced meat? This was human blood in quantity, human life as it spilled. It had its own unique horror. Some of it had oozed between the young man’s toes—the dark crimson colour stark against the pale skin of his feet, a gruesome parody of piano keys. He sat like an island amongst a grisly sea, a pale shadow within the dark, viscous surround. When he put a hand out to the wall and started to ease himself up, I wanted to cry out, to tell him to stay still. I wanted to stop him spoiling the perfect, limpid surface around him, breaking the seal.

It was the shock made me think that way. Of course it was.

“Charles?” His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been shouting. “God, I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life.” He took a couple of shaky steps toward me. His shoes and socks lay in a discarded pile against the wall, soaked red with the blood. I couldn’t take my eyes off the print left by his foot, a dark smudge on the area of clean floor behind him.

“Charles…?”

There were other footprints—messy, scattered marks on the floor beyond the display case. They weren’t all his. A large huddled object lay against the right-hand wall, half hidden behind the furniture. That area, too, was covered in blood. It wasn’t an object, of course it wasn’t. I was ashamed to have thought of it like one of my exhibits.

It was a body. The body of another young man, even paler, even more disturbed. Even more still.

Clare London, Author
Writing… Man to Man

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