Book Launch: the new novel from Rachel Abbott – THE BACK ROAD

I am delighted to announce that my new novel – The Back Road – has been launched in the UK!

For those who loved Only the Innocent, you will no doubt be pleased to hear that Tom Douglas is making a reappearance. In The Back Road, he is taking a sabbatical, but it doesn’t stop him from getting involved when he knows that there is a mystery to solve – and in the next book, he’s back in the police and ready for action.

Here’s what it’s all about:

One girl is fighting for her life in hospital. One village is struggling to hold tight to its secrets.

A year in the life of a self-published author: Part II – Preparing the book for launch

In the second part of this blog series to celebrate a year since the launch of Only the Innocent, I want to talk about everything that happened between the decision to publish, and the actual launch date. I will touch on the things that I did, and more importantly the things that I should have done – the lessons that I have learned.

In the world of technology, things move at a remarkable rate. When I was preparing Only the Innocent for the Kindle, the process I went through to convert my file from a Word document to a mobi file was very long-winded. I couldn’t find any really good converters, and there were plenty of warnings about bad output from Amazon’s own system, so the first thing that I had to do was spend time considering how best to format my book.

Faith Creation – All Lies Revealed by Christine Dougherty

Overview

It’s important to say at the outset that isn’t a book about religion – which is what I thought when I saw the title. It’s actually about a young girl called Faith, and the first part of the book focuses on her early life with her twin sister Charity, flashing between the present and the past – but beautifully done.

The novel starts with a remarkable opening line: “The first time my sister died, we were three years old” and builds steadily and consistently from this point, creating a sad tale of two young girls brought up in an apparently loveless home. It continues until Faith is in her early twenties.

It has a mixture of styles, from heartbreakingly sad to tense and scary, and Christine Dougherty carries them all off well. In places, her writing is superb and her use of imagery excellent. Although it’s not the usual action thriller style that is my preference in books, I found it totally compelling.