My Wicked Aunt Leonora

My Wicked Aunt Leonora is the author's third novel. She hopes that honesty and humour will appeal to the reader rather than sentiment and nostalgia.

The main character, Kathryn Shaw, has had an unusual and eventful twenty five years of life. She is feisty, wired and generous to a fault. After spending most of childhood in a Care Home, she convinces herself that romance is out of the question and steels herself against disappointment.

Unable to sleep from a reoccurring nightmare of drowning, she takes on night time work in a bistro just off the King's Road in London, enabling her to paint seascapes during the day. Sharing a house with three other weird tenants reinforces her suspicions that they also prefer nocturnal activities.

At the age of fifteen, after breaking into the Supervisor's office files at the Care Home, she discovers evidence of relatives in the form of hippie Godparents living in Newquay. They subsequently take her away to a better life where she finds fresh air and freedom to surf with Aussie Luke the Lifeguard.

Kathryn's struggle to find out her true identity is further complicated on her twenty fifth birthday by the appearance of a weird and beautiful, previously unknown aunt, who believes herself to be a "wampire" from Transylvania. Her aunt is driven by the desire to kill Kathryn to make her immortal and attempts and fails to bite, poison, or run over, her niece in night time car chases around Fulham, Battersea Park and The World's End in Chelsea. Kathryn is aided by a lovable, Shakespeare-misquoting tramp who she secretly feeds from the bistro. The tramp has a posse of "Necromantic Numbskulls" to help him deal with wicked Aunt Leonora. Chaos ensues throughout London and then Newquay during the Christmas holiday season.