Heart of Fire
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2006, 340 pp. Jacket art Robert Hunt
Read my review here.
Set in the 1920s, orphan Maddie lives with her grandparents. Then her brother Theo comes back from Zanzibar,
Bringing back with him a magnificent horse. Maddie loves the horse, but is not quite
so sure about her brother.
One dark night another young man turns up at the estate:
his name, he says, is Theo. So who is the right brother?
Rider in the Dark
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2004, 305 pp. Jacket art David Bowers
Read my review here.
Helena is the daughter of a magistrate. She lives in 18th century England, and everything
in her world is lovely,
until she discovers that her best friend Jamie is a smuggler,
and so, come to that, are much of the village.
Victoria Holmes
Victoria Holmes was educated at Oxford, where she studied English. After working
with horses for a year, and a brief stint at teaching English, she worked as an editor
for a school-
Her three historical novels cover different periods; 18th century smuggling, early 20th century identity confusion and Elizabethan Ireland in the aftermath of the Armada. Rider in the Dark I found more readable than Heart of Fire, but the author didn’t really persuade me to inhabit the books with her.
Finding the books: none of her titles were published in the UK, but are all readily available here.
Links and sources:
I review two of the books here.
Victoria Holmes on Wikipedia
Bibliography -
The Horse From the Sea
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2005, 309 pp.
Set in Ireland at the time of the Armada: Nora prefers the company of ponies to
people, but when the Armada
is wrecked off the coast of Ireland, she rescues a shipwrecked
Spaniard.
