The Season of Change

by Sheila O'Flanagan

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

A holiday in paradise they'll never forget...

Sheila O'Flanagan's The Season of Change transports her readers to the Caribbean island resort of White Sands, where visitors arrive hoping their dreams will come true — and they sometimes do. Not to be missed by readers of Veronica Henry and Freya North.

Where do you go to solve all your problems?

Where would you go if you were a singer fed up with the fame you never desired?

Where would you choose to get married if you didn't want a certain high-maintenance, nightmare guest in attendance?

Where would you go to pretend your marriage wasn't the sham you always thought it was?

And if you were a writer looking for a gripping new plot, where could you find it?

At the beautiful White Sands resort the Caribbean sunshine works its magic — just so long as its guests' troubles haven't followed them all the way to paradise...

The Season of Change was previously published as "Connections".

Release date: May 26, 2020

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 320

Sample

The number one question I’m asked by readers is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ For this collection of short stories, I’m able to answer that!

I was lucky enough to stay in a lovely hotel on a Caribbean island some time ago. It was an extremely popular wedding location and one evening I noticed a bride-to-be having a heated discussion with her partner. My imagination started to run away with me as I wondered what on earth they were arguing about and suddenly I was making up stories about the wedding couple and everyone else who stayed there – Connections is the result!

Additionally, many readers have asked me about sequels to some of my novels. I don’t generally like sequels myself, but from time to time I’ve thought about characters I’ve created and wondered what might have happened to them. So I’ve included two stories here with characters from Isobel’s Wedding and He’s Got To Go. I hope readers who have asked about Isobel and Bree will be happy with how things turned out for them! You may also pick up references to a couple of other characters from previous novels. I hope you’ll enjoy recognising them too.

I’d like to thank Ciara Considine for insisting that I write more short stories and editing these so meticulously, and Jess Whitlum-Cooper for all her work on this edition. Thanks also to Breda Purdue and Ruth Shern for being so unfailingly positive about my writing. More thanks to Isobel Dixon and everyone at the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency who have carried on Carole Blake’s legacy of work and fun being the same thing.

A special thank you to my family who are so wonderful – particularly my lovely nephews David, James, Hugh and Oisín.

And again, to all my readers, thank you for your support. I hope you enjoy this collection and that, no matter where you are, it transports you to tropical climes! You can keep in touch with me through my social media accounts:

http://www.facebook.com/sheilabooks

www.facebook.com/sheilabooks

www.twitter.com/sheilaoflanagan

www.instagram.com/sheilaoflanagan

Jennifer Jones sat at the table on her balcony.

No, thought Corinne, that’s too boring. It doesn’t say anything, doesn’t let people know where she is. Or what sort of person she is. Or what might be about to happen to her.

Jennifer Jones watched the crystal-clear water from the chair on her balcony.

But what’s she doing sitting down? Corinne asked herself. Why is she sitting around like a lame-ass when she’s somewhere gorgeous and exotic? And when she’s supposed to be gorgeous and exotic too? And especially when she’s supposed to be a sassy action heroine? She shouldn’t be sitting anywhere just looking at the sea like a feeble pensioner. (Though pensioners don’t have to be feeble. Note to self: how about a pensioner heroine for a future novel? Mightn’t that be interesting? Or is that too Agatha Christie? Miss Bloody Marple, of course. Nobody can do a pensioner like Miss Bloody Marple, can they?) Corinne frowned as she looked at her revised opening sentence again. I haven’t even said that it’s the sea she’s looking at, have I? Crystal-clear water could be a lake. I’m still not giving any information about what’s going to happen to her at all.

Jennifer Jones . . . Jennifer Jones . . . Corinne stared at the open laptop in front of her. Oh bloody hell, she thought. What the hell is going to happen to her? I’ve no damn idea. She pushed the laptop away from her in disgust and stared out over the blue and white wooden rails of the balcony of Room 404. She sighed deeply. Bloody Jennifer Jones. She loathed the woman. Detested her. Hated her. Abhorred her. Corinne pulled the laptop towards her again and clicked on the thesaurus. Abhor. Abominate. Deplore. Detest. Dislike. Execrate. She frowned. Was execrate a verb? She wasn’t sure. She’d never heard of it before. But it would do. If it meant what it was supposed to mean, then she absolutely totally and utterly execrated Jennifer Bloody Jones.

Corinne snapped the laptop closed and got up from the table. She walked back into the air-conditioned bedroom and picked up the pile of books on her bedside locker. They all had a black jacket with the silhouette of a tall, extremely thin woman etched on the front. The silhouette was in various colours. Vivid green. Pillar-box red. Shocking pink.

Jennifer Jones and the Jealous Journalist by Corinne Doherty. The Number 1 Bestseller. A new and exciting addition to the slick-chick genre. Jennifer Jones and the Jade Jester by Corinne Doherty. Further Adventures of Europe’s Sassiest Private Eye. Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot by Corinne Doherty. Ms Jones Rides High!

Why in God’s name had she called the woman Jennifer Jones? It was getting harder and harder to come up with clever titles – not that the ones she’d come up with before were all that clever, but the publisher loved the alliteration – and it was becoming even more difficult to think of a half-decent plot to go with them. How many murders could one woman solve, for heaven’s sake? How many times could her heroine save the day? Heroine, hah! Jennifer Jones wasn’t a heroine to Corinne. She was a bloody weight around her neck.

But Jennifer Jones was apparently a beloved heroine to loads of other people. What had started out as a kind of niche private eye caper had turned into an unexpectedly big seller and had, astonishingly, been bought by readers of the darker kind of crime novels too, propelling Jennifer Jones towards the top of the charts and fostering a clatter of Jennifer Jones fan-sites on the internet. (Corinne worried about some of Jennifer’s fans. They seemed to know more about her than she did herself!)

Of course she hadn’t expected anything like that to happen. When she’d tentatively sent off the first novel to an agent and had waited, with fingers crossed, to hear back from him, she’d loved the idea of her long-legged, beanpole-bodied supermodel private eye. And she’d loved the plot of the Jealous Journalist too, a plot that had come to her all of a sudden as she sat in the bath, so that she jumped out, towelled down and started writing straight away. But she hadn’t intended to write a damn series. The whole concept was a one-off as far as she was concerned. She hadn’t (if she was really truthful with herself) even expected the book to ever hit the shelves at all.

She flopped across the queen-sized bed and closed her eyes. When Arnie, her agent, had called to tell her about the publishing deal, she’d almost collapsed with the excitement. And when he’d told her that Dagger Press, the publishers, wanted a second book about the private eye from her, she’d barely hesitated before agreeing. After all, she reckoned, the Jealous Journalist had been easy to write. And even though she hadn’t intended another novel with Jennifer, well, she could manage it. So she did. The Jade Jester had been a bit more difficult to put together, but she’d suddenly found a cracking plot and, of course, Jennifer did her exotic thing the whole way through. That book had sold even more than the first. And then – well, everything should have been perfect. Most people would have said it actually was.

Arnie had called her, barely containing his excitement, to say that Dagger Press wanted more of Jennifer Jones. Lots more. And so did the reading public. They loved her. She was becoming a guaranteed bestseller. Dagger Press wanted to keep Corinne and Jennifer Jones on their list. Other publishing companies wanted her too. She was hot property. And – Arnie had paused for dramatic effect here – the TV people were interested. They loved cosy crime, he told her. Or glossy crime. Particularly for Sunday nights. Stuff like Midsomer Murders, where nothing was too gory or horrible but where there was a ridiculously high body count and an engaging sleuth. Jennifer Jones would fit that bill perfectly in a modern way. She would update the whole vista of Sunday-evening viewing. She was more than slick-chick territory – she could nab the older viewer too.

Corinne had always wanted to be hot property, although she’d never expected that it would really happen. And the idea of her stories being used as Sunday-evening TV was very exciting. But she felt a nervous flutter in the pit of her stomach.

‘I’ve only written two books,’ she told Arnie anxiously. ‘They can hardly make a series out of two books.’

‘What we’re talking about is adapting the books,’ he said. ‘Three- or four-parters. They can do the first two and by then you’ll have produced the third. After that we’ll see how to progress. There’s a lot of mileage in Jennifer Jones. You can do more books but the TV could equally be standalone, just using the character. You don’t have to write the TV stuff, of course.’

‘But . . .’ Corinne looked confused, ‘how can they do something when we don’t know what’s going to happen to the character? I mean, what if Jennifer Jones decides to get married?’

Arnie looked at her sternly. ‘Don’t do anything stupid like marry her off,’ he said. ‘The great thing about her is the chemistry between herself and the people she’s investigating. You can’t marry her off. And be careful who she sleeps with too. You don’t want to alienate anyone.’

Corinne blinked.

‘The public love her,’ said Arnie, a little more gently. ‘They’ve invested time and interest in her. You don’t want to piss them off.’

‘She’s my detective,’ said Corinne defiantly. ‘I can do what I want with her.’

‘Not when we sign this deal,’ Arnie told her. ‘She’ll become a brand name. You can’t mess with a brand name.’

Corinne hadn’t wanted Jennifer Jones to become a brand name. But when Arnie told her the amount of money involved for another three books, she took out her special contract-signing fountain pen and scrawled her signature straight away before the honchos in Dagger Press changed their minds. The money meant that she could pay off all of her debts (and put an end to those letters from her credit card company reminding her about the necessity to make the minimum payment every month); buy a new car and put a deposit on a lovely apartment; pay for her mother’s hip operation and her father’s glaucoma one; and give her adorable, but totally hopeless younger brother some cash towards setting up his own plumbing business. Although as she wrote out the cheque for Bill, Corinne couldn’t help thinking that it was money down the drain. Literally.

‘You’re the best, sis.’ His eyes were bright as she handed him the money. ‘I’ll make you so proud of me.’

She wrote Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot in a haze of delight, thinking of all the great things she could do for her family with the money she was going to bring in over the next few years. But Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot didn’t sell quite as well as Jennifer Jones and the Jade Jester. It made a quick appearance in the bestseller charts but was then bumped out by a flood of Nordic Noir crime books and a celebrity novel written by a stunning former catwalk model. In Corinne’s (admittedly biased) opinion, Model Murder was a blatant rip-off of Jennifer Jones, although the critics called it ‘grittier’. She was enraged that a grittier rip-off of her book was being paraded as a must-read for millions of TV viewers, and even more enraged when the interviewer on the programme told them that Model Murder was the best piece of crime fiction she’d read in years and that it was a definite number one.

Corinne had thought about making Jennifer Jones grittier herself but had been persuaded against it. She kept having wonderful ideas about her private eye getting hooked on designer drugs (after all, she moved in circles where recreational drug use was perfectly acceptable. As were uppers, downers and appetite suppressants), or taking a lesbian lover, or developing bulimia; but when she mentioned this to Arnie he’d nearly had a heart attack.

‘Jennifer Jones is a role model,’ he’d hissed at her. ‘Role models don’t have drugs issues or lesbian lovers. And they certainly don’t have bulimia.’

‘Princess Diana did,’ Corinne pointed out.

‘Yes. And she’s dead.’

Sometimes, thought Corinne, Arnie could be ruthlessly businesslike.

‘What about this Model Murder, though?’ asked Corinne. ‘Everyone thinks it’s brilliant. Rowena Roselli has taken over my spot!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Arnie snorted. ‘She’s a one-hit wonder. I have it on good authority that her next book is a crock of shit and the publishers are tearing their hair out over it.’

‘Yes, but she was on all the TV programmes,’ wailed Corinne. ‘Flaunting her jail sentence.’

Rowena, the author of Model Murder, had served a few months for supplying drugs. She’d been on Loose Women and The Graham Norton Show and a whole range of other TV programmes talking about her ‘lapse’ and how it had made her a better person. When she told her story everyone whooped and cheered and agreed that she deserved a second chance.

‘It’s a selling point, that’s all,’ said Arnie.

‘Well maybe I need a selling point too!’

Corinne had thought long and hard about what her selling point could be, but she couldn’t actually come up with anything. She’d led an unfortunately blameless and boring childhood. It was disgraceful, in fact, how boring her childhood had been, and now it had become a real drawback because it was so damn competitive out there – people wanted to read novels by authors who’d been abandoned by their parents or overcome some awful disease or done something really extraordinary in their lives (as though serving a jail sentence for drug-pushing was anything to be proud of, Corinne thought bitterly); it just wasn’t enough to have written a damn book any more.

‘You’re being paranoid,’ said Arnie when she wailed all this to him. ‘Stop thinking like a fool and get on with it.’

But she couldn’t get on with it. All she could do was think about Rowena Roselli and the huge feature article about her in the Sunday Times magazine, which pictured her draped in nothing but diamonds and smoking a cigar. The diamonds had given Corinne an idea about her own potential childhood problem. If she revealed to everyone that she was a reformed kleptomaniac, surely that would get her a few column inches in the papers?

The only slight flaw in the plan was that she’d never actually stolen anything in her life. Except the Cadbury’s Creme Egg from the display in the local Spar a few years earlier. And that wasn’t actually stealing. She’d picked it up and meant to pay for it along with the newspapers, magazines and birthday cards that she was buying and somehow she’d just managed to put it in her pocket before the sales assistant had rung it up on the till. She only realised it after she’d walked out of the shop and then she’d gone straight back in and paid for it.

All the same, she’d thought as she mulled over the idea, it was a possibility. When she’d been interviewed a few days later by someone doing a piece for the local paper about the sudden surge of crime-caper writers, she’d almost said something about the kleptomania. But in the end she’d chickened out. Her mother would go berserk if she read that Corinne had been robbing things from local shops, and in the end people would find out that she’d been lying anyway. Although maybe she could say that she was a pathological liar instead?

She rubbed her eyes in despair. She had to stop thinking like this and start thinking about her novel. But it was much harder than she’d expected. She hadn’t even managed to come up with a title, although that was the first thing she normally did. It was actually very difficult to think of titles for someone called Jennifer Jones, which was why she couldn’t start writing until she had the right one. Why on earth hadn’t she originally called the woman Brenda Byrne? she wondered. There were hundreds of brilliant titles that would go with Brenda Byrne. Brenda Byrne and the Battered Body. Basic Burglary. Breathless Beauty. Oh yes, thought Corinne miserably, Brenda Byrne and the Breathless Beauty would have been fantastic. She could have set it even more firmly in the supermodel world where Jennifer Bloody Jones was supposed to be plying her trade and it would have been miles better than Model Murder. It could have been an exposé of all the bitchery and back-stabbing that went on. (Back-stabbing, thought Corinne. Brenda Byrne and the Backstabbing Bitch! Brilliant!) Maybe, though, for someone called Brenda Byrne, which wasn’t a very glamorous name, she could have set it in the more prosaic world of catalogue modelling instead. She knew a bit about that. She’d done some work for catalogues in her early teens, before she lost her cheeky grin. That was why she’d made Jennifer Jones a model in the first place, moulding her on a simply gorgeous-looking woman who’d once been involved in catalogues too. Of course Jin Corcoran hadn’t stayed in modelling. Nor had she become a detective. She’d just got married to someone incredibly rich.

Corinne sighed deeply. She’d picked modelling because she was supposed to be writing about what she knew. Not, of course, that she knew a whole lot about gruesome murders either, but she’d once been introduced to a really nice Irish detective at a conference and Siobhán Farrell had become her sounding board for the criminal activities that went on in her books. Corinne was very grateful to her journalist friend JoJo for introducing her to Siobhán in the first place. She’d dedicated Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot to both of them. They’d been thrilled, but a lot of good that did when it hadn’t reached number one on the bestseller lists.

Jennifer Jones and the Jamaican Jerk. It had eventually come to her in the middle of the night and she thought (with an overwhelming sense of relief) that it was a good title. The publishers agreed.

So it became the title of the book she was supposed to be working on. That was why she was on this Caribbean island. (OK, so it wasn’t actually Jamaica, but she’d been there before on a last-minute cheap deal with two of her friends from the travel agency where she’d worked before becoming a best-selling crime-caper novelist, so her location didn’t really matter.) She’d decided to come to White Sands because she’d heard about it from another author at an awards ceremony to which she’d been invited even though she hadn’t actually been nominated. The ceremony had been excruciatingly awful. Rowena Roselli was up for best newcomer, though thankfully she hadn’t won. Corinne rather thought that there would have been a real-life murder if she had, because she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t have stabbed Rowena there and then. Which could have been a good selling point too, she supposed later. Maybe Jennifer Jones and the Jellybean Jackpot would have scorched through the charts if its author was in jail for the attempted murder of a rival novelist. But White Sands sounded a good deal better than jail. The ideal place, she thought as she packed a couple of sarongs and half a dozen swimsuits, to soak up some atmosphere for writing Jennifer Jones and the Jamaican Jerk.

If only she could come up with a plot. Her mind was a complete blank as far as Jennifer and the Jerk were concerned and she was terrified that she had writer’s block. Most writers she knew said that there was no such thing, that it was just an excuse for not sitting at the computer. But Corinne had sat at the computer for weeks back home, scrolling through her Twitter feed and checking her Amazon sales figures (she had to stop doing that, it was far too depressing), without even the tiniest edge of a plot coming to her. So now she was convinced that writer’s block was real and that she had it and that she’d never be able to write another word again.

She looked at the words she’d typed on the computer and deleted them all. They were rubbish. She was rubbish. She simply couldn’t do this any more.

She sat up again and checked her mobile. No messages. Nobody was looking for her. Well, she’d told them not to. She’d said that she was going to the Caribbean to work. She’d implied that she’d be totally out of touch (except, of course, with her muse. She’d have to be in touch with that. Whatever it was. Wherever it was).

‘Have a lovely time,’ her mother had said. ‘How lucky you are.’

‘I’ll be working,’ she reminded her.

‘I’d love to be working in the sun,’ said Lillian Doherty.

‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Corinne felt guilty. Guiltier still the day she’d left when the rain had been bucketing down out of the lumpy, leaden grey skies.

Jennifer Jones and the Jamaican Jerk. Maybe if she took her laptop down to the beach it might help.

Most people had already settled in to the daily routine. Loungers had been pulled into preferred locations along the narrow crescent of fine white sand. Holiday-makers were sleeping or reading, usually with a brightly coloured cocktail on the wooden tables beside them. Corinne scanned the reading material to see what was popular.

Three people were reading Model Murder. She bit her lip and tried to clamp down on her feelings of jealousy. After all, she told herself, it’s not like I don’t sell. It’s not like I’m a struggling author who hasn’t sold anything. It’s just that – she shivered in the warmth of the tropical sun – it’s just that I’m afraid I can’t do it any more. And if I can’t do it any more, then what the hell can I do?

The latest celebrity kiss-and-tell autobiography of a glamour model was the top non-fiction choice. Glamour modelling, mused Corinne, maybe that’s something that Jennifer Jones could get involved in. Jennifer Jones and the Glamour . . . only she couldn’t have Glamour in the title, it began with the wrong letter. She’d have to think of something else. Besides, Arnie wouldn’t want Jennifer Jones to be involved in glamour modelling. He’d think it was seedy, even if Corinne managed to persuade him that Jennifer was going under cover. She giggled to herself. Hardly under cover when you were talking about glamour modelling. There was something in that, surely. She’d met a guy from Amazon once who told her that the books that got the most hits on the site had the word naked in the title. Jennifer Jones Naked might be a good title, despite the lack of alliteration.

Nobody on the beach was reading Jennifer Jones. It didn’t matter what Arnie said. It didn’t matter how many books they told her they were selling. It was all going horribly wrong. She wasn’t required beach reading material. She was a has-been. A total failure.

She sat down on the nearest lounger, close to a man on his own. She’d seen him around the hotel before; he seemed to be alone with his young son, which Corinne thought was lovely. She liked the whole idea of a father–son bonding thing going on. Her useless brother, Bill, had a son of his own but he hardly ever got to see him. When Bill’s girlfriend Debbie had discovered she was pregnant, she’d told him that it was her problem and she would deal with it. Bill insisted he would take responsibility for his child, but Debbie’s idea of Bill’s responsibilities was for him to transfer a huge chunk of his salary every month to her account to support them. Which would have been fair enough, thought Corinne, except that she then moved house so that she was now a four-hour drive away which meant that it was difficult for Bill to see his son regularly. She was sure that Bill would have loved to come to the island with Hal for a bit of male bonding. Perhaps, if she ever managed to write this damn book, she could pay for them to go.

Corinne shivered again. She peeped over the top of the computer at the man on his own, who was staring, unseeingly, across the water. He looked worried, thought Corinne. She wondered why.

Stop wondering, she told herself firmly. Stop wondering about people around you and start blo. . .