Lemonade and Lies

Jill Webster is an optimist. Her mother taught her from an early age to turn life’s lemons into lemonade. But when you’re a single-parent trying to juggle two children, a job, pay the mortgage, fix a dodgy boiler and scrape up this month’s child minding fees, you have to squeeze those lemons pretty hard. But that’s the easy bit.

Ask her – and she’ll tell you she’s just an ordinary thirty-something. So why is someone stalking her, threatening her children? She convinces herself it’s a case of mistaken identity. But when she’s attacked and ends up in hospital, Jilly has to face the fact that her normal life has changed forever.

When she finds out that her ex-husband Bill (who abandoned her for a twenty-one year old computer tech) has been leading a double life on the criminal margins, putting her and her kids Millie and Tom in danger, Jill turns into a ruthless tigress protecting her cubs and taking the man on at his own game. Bill has a dark secret that makes him dangerous to his Russian Mafia bosses and he’s dragged her into it.

The problem is Jill has no idea what that secret is. Her search for the truth takes her on a dangerous journey, away from her beloved Cornwall. Her internal Sat-Nav leads her to the fishing village of Maidens in south west Scotland and the dark icy waters of a Norwegian Fjord at midnight.

Just when she thinks she will never be safe again, Jill finds an ally. A man she feels she can rely on and someone who can help solve the mystery. Someone who once again makes her feel vibrant and alive, reminds her she is a woman, and in a hotel in Norway with the temperature below zero, they turn up the heat. It’s a glorious, even ecstatic, coupling of two lonely human beings, greedy for physical touch. It’s pure sex, lust, carnality. It’s unforgettable. But is it love?