Brenda Hurley

Brenda Hurley trained as a dress designer at Bradford College of Art. She worked in the clothing industry, starting her own manufacturing company, before moving with her husband to Hertfordshire. In 1981, she went back to college to develop new skills in fine art at St Albans School of Art. Later, she studied at Amersham & Wycombe College, gaining a Distinction in the Bucks Higher Diploma in Art and Design course.

As well as exhibiting her work, including with the National Acrylic Art Society, she tutored for local art societies and art groups, and ran many workshops. She has been a lifelong storyteller, and has three novels published by Troubador.

Published October 2025
ISBN: 9781917625067

Jackie Richards

Jackie Richards was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and has lived in London since her early twenties. After many years as a presenter and producer for the BBC’s Latin American service, she turned her creative focus to photography, studying at Richmond Adult Community College.

Dogs have always played a central role in Jackie’s life; soon she began taking pictures of the dogs she encountered in work environments as she travelled in the UK and abroad — a project that grew into Dogs in the Workplace.

Published October 2025
ISBN: 9781917625050

Mary Walsh

Mary L Walsh has been writing poetry since childhood. This collection reflects her upbringing with an Irish father and second generation Irish mother in Dagenham, Essex.

Her poem Mackerel Fishing in the Gaeltacht was shortlisted for the Sean Dunne Poetry Competition in 2024. She has had poems published in Crannóg magazine, Visualverse.org, and in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s Pen to Print Write On magazine. She has also written a crime novel, Detective Armando Ramirez and the Iberico Ham Murder.

Published September 2025
ISBN: 9781917625043

Cath Rathbone Cheker

Cath grew up in Uruguay, speaking both English and Spanish. She always wished to become a writer but thought it would never happen because she is dyslexic. Instead, she had a career in education and was a vibrant and beloved teacher, dedicated to her profession, for over thirty years.

Today, Cath is thrilled to call herself a writer at last, and to see this – her first book – in print. She writes almost every day. Cath lives in the USA, with her husband, Carlos, close to her grandsons, who advise her on plot development, and root for their favourite characters.

Published June 2025
ISBN: 9781917625036

Bill Randall

Born and raised in Aylesbury, Bill has always found time for the creative arts. Starting his career in finance, he travelled to London in the evenings and at weekends to study sound engineering. He then spent ten years working for the police, while also playing bass in a London-based alternative rock band. He tried his luck as a full-time musician, which lasted six months before the birth of his daughter clarified the need for a salaried post. He currently works as a training manager in the energy industry.

Alongside writing, his passion is playing guitar as a session musician, both on the road and in the recording studio. His experiences in the police and the music industry align with his love of crime fiction in this, his brilliant first novel.

Published April 2025
ISBN: 9781917625012

Lesley Coates Jones

An encounter is no ordinary meeting. It carries the element of surprise – a sort of epiphany. It is not given to everyone; rather, it chooses you, this indefinable cataclysm. It is a gift to cherish.

Lesley Coates Jones is a professional artist. She paints, draws, writes and makes marks. Chance Encounters is a collection of poems accompanied by a series of pen-and-ink drawings, taken from her personal sketchbooks, offering an intimate insight into her vision of the world. This is a beautiful hardback book.

Published March 2025
ISBN: 9781917625029

Dave Hobart

Dave grew up in Harrow. Leaving school, he secured a plumbing apprenticeship but a career change soon followed: he joined the Metropolitan Police Force and realised he had found his vocation. Moving from uniform to CID, he served on numerous crime squads, the last being murder squads in North London.

After Dave retired, he was drawn back into the police family as a civilian, working for various constabularies, investigating serious crime. When retirement proper finally caught up with him, he put pen to paper, realising a long-term ambition to distil his work/life experiences into a novel about a young man wrongly accused and on the run…

Published December 2024
ISBN: 9781917625005