The ROME ALONE Series

ROME ALONE was conceived in Rome on a weekend mini-break one September! However, I was alone, as the title suggests, wandering around the sites and observing other tourists. It poured with rain at night, but was warm and sunny during the day, as is often the case in Rome in the autumn.

The first novel in the series was one of 100 winners in the Writers’ and Artists’ New Novel Centenary Award. Since then, ROME ALONE has turned into a series, with three sequels and two more on the way – one already completed, and with the final book currently moored off Venice! If you read the novels, you will understand why!

ROME ALONE follows two parallel stories which begin to twist and turn for the principal characters -unhappy homemaker Belinda Rightson and Alzheimer’s expert Dr Neil McCarthy. Both embark on solo trips to Rome to try and forget their heartache – and inadvertently follow each other around the Eternal City. While Belinda – Bee – enjoys the comforts of a five-star boutique hotel on Via Vittoria Veneto, abstemious Dr McCarthy suffers in discomfort in a one-star pensione filled with students near the railway station.

*Via Vittorio Veneto in the rain, sending Bee and Dr McCarthy scurrying for an umbrella*

In the sequel, ROME AGAIN, the dark forces neither Bee nor Dr McCarthy suspected on their first trip begin to surface.

*Arena di Verona, where Moira’s adventure begins*

The third book in the series, VERONA ALONE, follows former professional cellist Moira, who celebrates her divorce from Dr McCarthy’s brother – a philandering TV doctor – by booking a solo trip to Verona during the summer opera festival. There she is taken under the wing of a generous American, who turns out to be not quite as he seems.

*Romeo’s door in Verona, where Moira agrees to meet an interesting stranger* *for lunch*

In the fourth book in the series, VERONA AGAIN, Moira has to return to Verona to lay a ghost, while the dark forces that emerged in Rome continue to reveal themselves, affecting all the characters in ways they could not have imagined – interlinking their lives and even placing them in danger.