Lucy Brazier & Sinister Dexter — ‘Sometimes the opposite of right isn’t wrong. It’s left.’

Please put your hands together to welcome Lucy Brazier to First Night Design. She is here to describe the third in her trilogy of amusing and mystery-ridden novels that give new meaning to college life from a female Deputy Head Porter’s point of view.

After avoiding the murderous intentions of The Vicious Circle in First Lady Of The Keys and risking life and limb to find a priceless missing painting in The Vanishing Lord, our heroine Deputy Head Porter finds herself once again at the centre of strange and macabre goings-on in the notorious Old College.

One of the oldest and most illustrious educational establishments in the country, Old College boats a bloody and turbulent 400-year-old history and the arrival of its first female Deputy Head Porter has done little to calm matters. if anything, it’s made them worse. We join Deputy Head Porter at the beginning of a new academic year where the induction of a new Bursar – the enigmatic Professor Dexter Sinistrov – causes ructions. With his first act of office being to cut the tea and biscuit budget for the Porters’ Lodge, he makes himself instantly unpopular with the bowler-hatted staff within. But it is more his penchant for poisoning people that really concerns Deputy Head Porter.

Meanwhile, Head Porter appears to be leading a secret double life and The Dean is convinced that Russian spies are after his job. When two dead bodies turn up at the bottom of the College gardens, Deputy Head Porter is determined that there will not be another College cover-up, even if that does mean begrudgingly working alongside unwelcome outsiders DCI Thompson and DS Kirby. Add to that a wayward College drinking society and an ageing Lothario of a professor and Deputy Head Porter really does have her hands full.

The Blurb:

Sometimes the opposite of right isn’t wrong. It’s left.

Tragedy strikes once more at Old College… The Porters’ Lodge is down to its last tea bag and no one has seen a biscuit for over a week. Almost as troubling are the two dead bodies at the bottom of the College gardens and a woman has gone missing. The Dean is convinced that occult machinations are to blame, Deputy Head Porter suspects something closer to home.

The formidable DCI Thompson refuses to be sidelined and a rather unpleasant Professor gets his comeuppance.

As the body count rises, Head Porter tries to live a secret double life and The Dean believes his job is under threat from the Russian Secret Service.

Deputy Head Porter finds herself with her hands full keeping Old College running smoothly as well as defending herself against the sinister intentions of the new Bursar.

Spies, poisoning, murder – and none of this would be any problem at all if only someone would get the biscuits out and put the kettle on…

This is the third instalment of the world-renowned PorterGirl series set in the ancient and esoteric Old College. Author Lucy Brazier opens the lid on a world which has sinister overtones in this cozy, BritLit mystery.

Available to pre-order now, general release 27th April 2018.

Amazon UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BZS9H42/

Amazon USA:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BZS9H42/

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Follow Lucy Brazier:

www.portergirl.com

www.whoshottonyblair.com

Facebook     @PorterGirl100

Finnegans Wake – a guide by an idiot

Never A Cross Word – A Poirot Parody for Captain Hastings fans everywhere 

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Take care and keep laughing!

“We live in a world of guided missiles and misguided men.” – Art of Quotation

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR DAY, 15th January 2018, United States

Never was this truer than it is today.

“We live in a world of guided missiles and misguided men.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., minister, religious figure, activist, author, speaker

via “We live in a world of guided missiles and misguided men.” – Art of Quotation

Take care and keep laughing!

Flora Annie Steel | stuartshieldgardendesign

Flora Annie Steel (2 April 1847 – 12 April 1929) was an English writer who was noted for writing books set in British India or otherwise connected to it.   Personal life She was born Flora Ann…

Source: Flora Annie Steel | stuartshieldgardendesign

“It is my deepest wish that photography…will be included among the arts.” – Art of Quotation

“It is my deepest wish that photography, instead of falling in the domain of industry, of commerce, will be included among the arts. That is its sole, true place, and that is the direction th…

Source: “It is my deepest wish that photography…will be included among the arts.” – Art of Quotation

People : Violet Trefusis . Vita’s True Love . | stuartshieldgardendesign

Violet Trefusis (née Keppel; 6 June 1894 – 29 February 1972) was an English writer and socialite. She is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the poet Vita Sackville-West, which the two women continued after their respective marriages to men. Trefusis wrote novels and non-fiction works, both in English and French.

The affair was featured in novels by both parties, in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography, and in many letters and memoirs of the period, roughly 1912–1922. Many are preserved at Yale University Library. Trefusis also inspired other fiction and was featured as a pivotal character in these novels, including “Lady Montdore” in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and…

Source: People : Violet Trefusis . Vita’s True Love . | stuartshieldgardendesign

People : Bloomsbury , Dora Carrington | stuartshieldgardendesign

Originally posted on stuartshieldgardendesign.

Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932), known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey.

Early life

The daughter of a Liverpool merchant, she was born in Hereford, England, and attended the all-girls’ Bedford High School which emphasized art. Her parents also paid for her to receive extra lessons in drawing. She went to the Slade School of Art at University College, London where she subsequently won a scholarship; her fellow students included Paul Nash, Christopher R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her, as was Nash’s younger brother John Nash, who hoped to marry her. Gertler pursued Carrington for a number of years, and they had a brief sexual relationship during the years of the First World War.

From her time at the Slade onwards, she was commonly known simply by her surname. She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.

Career and personal life

Carrington was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, though she was closely associated with Bloomsbury and, more generally, with “Bohemian” attitudes, through her long relationship with…

via People : Bloomsbury , Dora Carrington | stuartshieldgardendesign.

Anne Seymour Damer (1749-1828) Sculptor & Author | Regency History

How uplifting to discover a female artist from history about whom I knew nothing. Thank you, Regency History.

Anne Seymour Damer
after Angelica Kauffman (c1800)

Profile

Anne Seymour Damer (1749-1828) was an English sculptor and author. She was a cousin of Horace Walpole and in his will, he left her a life interest in his Twickenham home, Strawberry Hill.

Family background

Anne Seymour Conway was born on 8 November 1749 in Sevenoaks, Kent. She was the only child of Henry Seymour Conway, a Field Marshal in the British army and Whig MP, and his wife Caroline, daughter of John Campbell, 4th Duke of Argyll, and widow of the 3rd Earl of Ailesbury.

Anne lived with her family at Park Place, Remenham, near Henley-on-Thames. Her father’s secretary, David Hume, encouraged her to develop her skills in sculpture.

An unhappy marriage

On 14 June 1767, Anne married the Honourable John Damer, but the marriage was not happy. They separated after seven years and on 15 August 1776, Anne’s husband committed suicide, leaving huge…

via Regency History.

Free Children’s Book: Runaway Smile

Nicholas C. Rossis

I woke up this morning and I had lost my smile and it wasn’t my fault and I looked everywhere and it was gone. Then I met a workman and a king and the best salesman in the world and a clown and no-one wanted to give me theirs. At school, I asked Miss to give me hers, but she gave us a pop quiz instead, and then no-one was smiling and…

A little boy wakes up in the morning and realizes he has lost his smile. After spending the entire day trying to find it, he learns the truth behind smiles: the only real smiles are the shared ones.

Runaway Smile is my first children’s book and it is finally here, after two long years of preparation! Just for the wonderful people following me on my blog, I have posted it online, where you can read it for free! If you enjoy it, feel…

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The Friday Fiction featuring Dax Christopher

I was so struck by this poem from Dax Christopher that I had to re-blog it.

aliisaacstoryteller

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Justice in Winter

(The Goddess of Wind and Rain)

Deep in the woods off a long, winding road, and finding no reasons for where she now lay

Was a broken young woman half buried in snow, just married, half clothed in torn rags and the gray

Of the season that later would prey on her heart and remain there until she had seen her last day.

Dismayed eyes spoke of betrayal and hurt and had frozen, uncertain of why she was slain

In a portrait of ice and without any warning, but morning would yield all the answers she’d need.

If only she’d known of the meeting of late she might not have died there under the tree.

But as is often the case, we see everything clearer in the mirror when everything’s done and behind us.

When life gets too warm and cozy it goes without notice until something…

View original post 3,819 more words