These free novels are just for you.
Take some time out for yourself. You deserve it.
New Zealand or England. Where will you go first?
Take some time out for yourself. You deserve it.
New Zealand or England. Where will you go first?
Free From The Tracks is the first in this series for teenagers and is FREE to download on Amazon and at all other eBook retailers.
All three of the books in this series have been awarded 5 star reviews by popular review site, Readers’ Favorite in the teenage genre.
I wrote the first novel for my daughter, who at the time was fifteen. She agreed to beta read it for me and promised she would read a chapter a night in between homework. A few hours after disappearing to her room to read the first chapter, she walked into my bedroom waving her Kindle. I cringed. She’d been known to verbally fry many a competent writer within the teenage genre. But to my surprise she put her hand on her hips, declared it passable and demanded a second book. I obliged that same year and added Sophia’s Dilemma to the Troubled stable and later, A Trail of Lies, which was originally released under its working title of Blaming the Child. The first two books share characters but the third happens in the same secondary school, with a different group of teenagers.
This series is based in Hamilton in New Zealand, a pretty town in the North Island which recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. The first novel deals with the issue of school bullying. There is a mystery element in all three novels. Sophia’s Dilemma continues the story of Sophia and Dane as they stumble along, suffering from the bad choices of parents and role models. Both teenagers come from broken homes and there are mentions of drug use and the manufacture of the drug known as ‘P’ in New Zealand.
A Trail of Lies is a little different, focussing on the life of a local policeman’s daughter, who attends the same school as Sophia and Dane. This is the more serious of the three, touching on the subjects of rape and self-harming and having a more psychological flavour.
Sophia Armitage has a secret that will make everyone see her differently. She’s a decent girl from a good family. They have worked hard to end up on ‘the right side of the tracks’ in the central north island town of Hamilton in New Zealand.
But things are never quite what they seem and for the troubled teen, life at the failing high school in the north of the city starts to horribly unravel. Finally pushed too far by a group of girls whose only purpose in life is to make her existence a misery, Sophia is forced to fight back, ending in disastrous consequences.
Sophia’s painful crush on Dane McArdle, the alpha male of the poisonous little group from the wrong side of town, unleashes a whole host of trouble onto Sophia’s head.
Their families are so different and yet who gets to decide which side of the tracks is the right side and once you’ve landed on the wrong side, what will be the cost of crossing back over?
For Sophia, life is a mundane, teenage existence, except for her hot, bad-boy boyfriend, Dane McArdle.
Along with all that brooding hotness comes a drug-addicted mother and a violent stepfather. When a body is discovered in his home, Sophia knows she must do everything possible to help Dane; until she overhears a conversation that shatters all her dreams of a happy ending.
Will Sophia risk her own heart and help Dane, or face watching him lose everything he holds dear?
A distraught teenage girl, a lonely mountain of secrets, a boy skilled in bush-craft, what could possibly go wrong?
“You hate too many things, Cal,” he sighed, brushing stray curls away from her face. “Your heart doesn’t have room for it all.”
When Callister Rhodes runs away from home, she expects to leave her problems far behind. Persuading a classmate to take her into the bush on Mount Pirongia, they stumble on a secret that is not easily forgotten and its menace follows her back to Hamilton, staining her new life with old, familiar wounds.
What happens in the bush should stay in the bush, but it won’t. As the consequence of what they did wraps itself around the teenagers, they find themselves in danger. Calli realises all too late that the demons in her past have come full circle and want payback.
The treacherous New Zealand bush offers Calli love and salvation before snatching both cruelly away. But in her quest to find escape she is forced to test her own limits and ultimately, find herself.
This story line contains issues such as mental illness, self-harming and the theme of rape is touched upon, but not explicitly.
