One For The Little Dog In Pants

1984 Crete
Zoe Matthews feels she no longer belongs in Crete. Too many altercations and feuds have taken their toll. With a heavy heart, she leaves behind her best friends Tia and Mel. Hopefully they will soon be reunited when they too return to the UK. 2015 – Zoe wonders why, with the prevalence of social media, the search for her two friends proves futile. Mel cannot be traced at all but she does know through a distant friend that Tia is still living in Crete, but the address is unkown. With a determination that she hasn’t felt for thirty one years since abruptly leaving the beautiful island, she returns to seek out Tia and hopefully rekindle the past. Once again on Cretan soil, she feels the magnetism and chides herself for not returning sooner. Will she be able to let bygones be bygones? Will she discover the mystery of the missing locket? Does Damianos still live here and will the ominous prison still be guarding the town of Neapoli? For a moment, the world stands still as she embraces the pure Cretan air. If she finds Tia and hopefully Mel, she knows she will be able to confront the past and make peace with the island and its people once more.

Deputy Marshal Zeb Clemens can’t die.

After the Civil War came to a close, Zeb decided to head west to raise cattle and a family if he could manage it.

No sooner did he step off the train in Texas, a stray bullet knocked him senseless. Believing he’d somehow cheated death, he gave up on his peaceful plans and became a lawman.

A lawman with a secret. And an edge.

After migrating farther west into the New Mexico Territory, he expected to find the usual run-of-the-mill outlaws?not a strange woman watching him from the edge of his dreams.

Meanwhile, stories of an inhuman monster attacking people in the nearby town of Devil’s Creek begin making their rounds.

Even crazier, Zeb feels compelled to hunt it?all while dealing with a murderous gang of outlaws and the missing boy of a waitress Zeb has taken a shine to.

It’s a good thing Zeb Clemens can’t die — because this job would definitely kill him.

“Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.” Kenneth Tynan (writing in 1953)

Noel Coward, ‘the master’, is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of twentieth century entertainment. Prodigiously talented, he blazed a trail through theatre, film and song on both sides of the Atlantic. In the theatre he wrote hit plays like The Vortex, Private Lives, Hay Fever, Cavalcade and Blithe Spirit. On film he wrote the war classic In Which We Serve and the timeless love story Brief Encounter. His songs, which number into the hundreds, include ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, ‘I’ll See You Again’, ‘A Room with a View’, ‘The Stately Homes of England’ and ‘Mrs Worthington’.

His greatest creation may even have been himself – what Time called ‘a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise’. This led to his increasing celebrity on American television in the 1950s and in a series of wildly successful one-man shows in Las Vegas, not to mention his popularity as a character actor in the last decade of his life. But as this shrewd biography shows, Coward also suffered, throughout his career, from accusations that he was squandering his gifts for the sake of superficial acclaim. Was his merely ‘a talent to amuse’? Rather than allowing such a claim to stand, this biography reveals the man as an innovator, enduring influence and immortal in the worlds which he sought to conquer.