Spring News

‘Drowning Not Waving’ will be out in paperback on 13th of April 2023.

Here’s a taster:
The lives of the people of Scarborough have always been tied to the sea. Often their deaths too. And when the body of a young man is pulled from the harbour, the police investigation has to dive into the tightly knit fishing community. But DC Donna Morris, halfway through her probationary period in the town, finds very little is at it seems.

Is the killing to do with old rivalries or more contemporary enmities, or is it somehow linked with a shocking murder which took place in the town twenty years ago? Donna does her best to navigate the tides and currents of the place she calls home for now, but find people are prepared to muddy the truth if it means preserving the past, and their reputations.

NB: I have tried everything to get the link below to open in a new window and it won’t,
so maybe read the rest of the post before clicking on it?

Drowning Not Waving: a completely thrilling new police procedural set in Scarborough a book by Kate Evans. (bookshop.org)

Spring Inspiration

Every so often I ask a poet whether I can publish one of their pieces and to explain what inspired it. All three of my Donna Morris books has a poem by me in it, not so cunningly disguised a Eta Snave. In ‘Drowning Not Waving’, the poem is Landscape Adjustments.

Landscape Adjustments
The world changes
after a storm
trees become bonsai
telegraph poles fence tops.

The old lady oak
in her pleated serge cloak
has a mirror now
to gaze at herself in
and weep
for her once straight spine
is crooked
her arms bent
too heavy
to embrace the sky.

Sheep stare warily
at the creep of water
ducks rejoice
at new possibilities.

Their view is for ever altered
they’ll remember pasture
as greener than it really was,
less bogged
in manured mud.

Oak, sky, sheep, duck
watch the waters recede
their field
no longer – quite –
as they recall it.

I am surprised to find I initially wrote this in 2004. Most of my poems composed in that period of depression have not stood the test of time. But I think this one has. I remember the initial inspiration being a train journey to see my therapist. There had been a lot of rain and the landscape looked very different from the way it had the week before.

Nineteen years ago, I was undoubtedly writing about my internal landscape which was being transformed in all sorts of ways. However, for ‘Drowning Not Waving’, the poem takes on a new meaning, to fit with the novel’s theme of climate change.

I like when poems metamorphose over time or by being read and engaged with by another person. It gives them life!