Hi, I’m Ciar, thanks for visiting my website!
My debut novel, A Deadly Discovery, is set in my hometown of Lewes, East Sussex, in 1928. It is a Golden Age murder mystery starring Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell as a pair of unlikely sleuths investigating the murder of a glamorous young archaeologist. The follow-up, A Lethal Cocktail, about a society wedding gone wrong in the Sussex seaside town of Rottingdean, will be published in May 2025.
You can also find me writing about gardening in the Daily Mail on Saturday and for The Lady magazine, and about media for InPublishing. I’m a former Arts and Media Correspondent for The Independent and have worked as a staff journalist for The Guardian website and Private Eye.
I have a Garden Design Diploma from the English Gardening School at Chelsea Physic Garden and an RHS Level 2 Certificate in the Principles of Horticulture from Plumpton College in East Sussex. For three years I spent one day a week volunteering in the garden at Charleston farmhouse, the country retreat of Vanessa and Duncan Grant. It was while weeding in the borders that I first began to imagine what life must have been like when they were living there and Virginia came to visit, and the seed of an idea was born…