Author also writes under B.L Bayes At the age of six, I proudly wrote and illustrated my first book 'The Hidden Hand', a thrilling mystery that involved an intrepid heroine who found her own missing hand in the upper branches of a tree. Those were innocent times—I’m sure that today I’d be whisked away to a child psychologist for analysis. After all, it was a rather strange and ghoulish topic for a six-year-old. My love of mysteries only deepened over time and by the age of fifteen I had read every Agatha Christie published to date. Decades of writing followed, with a number of short stories published in literary magazines alongside a semi-successful art career and an ongoing deep-dive into Jane Austen. Locust Hill is my third self-published book on Kindle and, for those who enjoy a backstory, you might be interested to learn that this book’s creation was a new experience for me as a writer. Rather than taking a novel and adapting it to screenplay format as is usually the case, this story actually began life as a movie script. After submitting it for reviews on a well-known screenplay site, the feedback I received was full of enough encouraging praise that I was inspired to work backwards and flesh out the script into a short novel. I spend my days in our tiny apartment in the sky, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and working on my next psychological suspense.