How I’d love to have more images of my rose-tinted infant holidays on the Norfolk Broads – the sparkling River Bure, the showy white lilies, the sausage-headed river reeds, the slithery black eels and orange-beaked, stately swans. Then there’s the melting red strawberries, plump glossy cherries, chubby plums and rosy-cheeked apples. As for my seventies-clad, gorgeous mum and dad…

Well, the answer is to put pen to paper and write them down. I did this by condensing all those incredible memories in my CE Rose domestic suspense thriller, THE HOUSE ON THE WATER’S EDGE.

After her mother’s unexpected death in a road accident, my protagonist, Ali Baker, travels to Norfolk to sort out her affairs, but she’s increasingly haunted by both the past and her mother’s last words to her: there is something I really need to tell you… What on earth did her mum mean? Could it have something to do with her father’s death immediately after their last perfect summer in Norfolk, twenty-five years ago?

But there’s another twist in this real life tale. My long-dead parents helped me write it, not only by inspiring the story but from their own written contributions! After my dad died, my sister found a bundle of letters in a lovely leather pouch and gave them to me. When I was in the right head space, I took a deep breath, pulled at the ribbon and discovered thirty or so love letters written between my parents from when my dad was in a men’s sanatorium, suffering from tuberculosis. As you can imagine, it was quite an emotional experience; I didn’t need a photograph to picture them, as their  personalities flew off the page – my dad’s humour and his clear adoration of my mum; her more circumspect affection and dry wit. But separate from the rest was a lone letter from my dad with some of the pages missing. The tone was a far cry from his usual lighthearted patter, so that set my imagination off. What did the rest of the letter say? What was the reason for the dramatic change in mood? Though it was entirely in my fervid mind, similar to Ali Baker, I went on a voyage of discovery, and wrote up my findings in THE HOUSE ON THE WATER’S EDGE.

I’m sure my brilliant parents will forgive my intrusion into their twenty-one and twenty-three year old lives and are proudly reading the words over my shoulder. And at the end of the day, though the location and the love letters are real, the remainder of this twisty tale is shocking, dark and entirely fictional.