Cover image © Ray Lipscombe

Oh, it's been a while in the making, but I'm delighted to share that my next book, Hiding the Flame, will be out very soon.

At the end of The Rose of Florence, there were some characters that had more to say, and some that I couldn't let go. This book is set about 18 years after The Rose, when Florence was once again in turmoil. So, it provided the perfect backdrop to this next story. Do you have to have read The Rose of Florence? No, but if you have, you'll recognise some of the characters.

Here's the blurb from the back cover...

Florence, 1495. The city's beauty is shadowed by the fires of religious zeal.

Francesca Rosini has always lived in the glow of great art. In the workshop of her family's friend, Sandro Botticelli, she finds a world of colour, light, and possibility - a world denied to women. Her days are divided between the hospital wards, where she tends the sick, and the palazzo, where her family plans a marriage to secure their legacy. But Francesca's heart will soon be lost - not to the man chosen for her, but to a woman whose presence ignites a passion as dangerous as it is forbidden. As the preacher Savonarola's power tightens its grip on Florence, beauty itself comes under threat. Caught between duty and desire, faith and freedom, Francesca must decide: will she perserve the life she's been given, or risk everything to protect the art, the love, and the truth she cannot live without?

Rich with the scent of linseed oil and the sound of church bells, Hiding the Flame is a story of forbidden love, artistic longing, and the courage to defy the darkness.