About the Author

Author of two major murder mystery series, featuring Thea Osborne, house sitter in the Cotswolds and Persimmon Brown, Lake District florist. Also "ghost writer" of the novels based on the ITV series Rosemary and Thyme. Seven earlier titles (known as the Westcountry mysteries) feature Drew Slocombe, undertaker (who turns up again in the Cotswolds) and Den Cooper, police officer. Many of these titles have been reissued by Joffe Books as ebooks.

LIST OF TITLES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

A Dirty Death (Den Cooper and Lilah)

Dark Undertakings (Drew and Karen Slocombe)

Death of a Friend (Den and Lilah)

Grave Concerns (Drew, Karen and Maggs)

A Death to Record (Den and Lilah)

The Sting of Death (Den, Drew, Karen)

A Market for Murder (Den, Drew and Karen)

COTSWOLDS

A Cotswold Killing (Thea Osborne)

A Cotswold Ordeal (Thea and Phil)

Death in the Cotswolds (Thea, Phil and Ariadne)

Mystery in the Cotswolds (Thea and Phil)

Blood in the Cotswolds (Thea and Phil)

Slaughter in the Cotswolds (Thea)

Fear in the Cotswolds (Thea)

A Grave in the Cotswolds (Drew and Thea)

Deception in the Cotswolds (Thea)

Malice in the Cotswolds (Thea)

Shadows in the Cotswolds (Thea)

Trouble in the Cotswolds (Thea)

Revenge in the Cotswolds (Thea)

Guilt in the Cotswolds (Thea and Drew)

Peril in the Cotswolds (Thea and Drew - now married)

Crisis in the Cotswolds (Thea and Drew)

Secrets in the Cotswolds (Thea and Drew) 

A Cotswold Christmas Mystery (Thea and Stephanie) 

Betrayal in the Cotswolds(Thea) (July 2022)

A Discovery in the Cotswolds (Sept 2023)

THE LAKE DISTRICT

The Windermere Witness

The Ambleside Alibi

The Coniston Case

The Troutbeck Testimony

The Hawkshead Hostage

The Bowness Bequest (first appearance of Christopher Henderson)

The Staveley Suspect

The Grasmere Grudge 

The Patterdale Plot 

The Ullswater Undertaking 

The Threlkeld Theory

The Askham Accusation

The Borrowdale Body

The Dacre Dilemma

The Eskdale Episode

The Langdale Legacy

All these titles can be ordered from www.allisonandbusby.com

New Books

Email orders to rebeccatope@btinternet.com

The following self-published titles are in paperback, and only available directly from me at present.

Payment is best achieved via Paypal, but other methods are possible.

Wendy in Wartime.

Shortly to be available as an ebook as well as a paperback, this is the blurb that should ensure gratfying sales (thanks to the wonders of AI) 

A wartime life, told in her own words. In November 1939, with the war just two months old, Wendy Scorer married Hugh Farthing — a handsome young RAF pilot more than six years her junior — in a hasty white wedding at her parents’ house in Bowdon. Two years later, Hugh would be shot down over Singapore, missing presumed dead, leaving Wendy a widow at twenty-eight.

Drawing on Wendy’s gloriously frank diaries and a vast cache of family letters preserved across three generations, bestselling novelist Rebecca Tope reconstructs her aunt’s Second World War in extraordinary detail. Here is the British home front as it was actually lived by the affluent upper-middle classes: hasty weddings and sudden postings, fur boleros and ration coupons, dances at the airfield, infidelities forgiven and unforgiven, and an unending paper lifeline of letters criss-crossing wartime Britain.

From the early idyll at Kinloss in the far north of Scotland, to ambulance-driving on icy Cheshire roads, to weekends in London hotels under the doodlebugs; from the slow, agonising loss of Hugh in the Far East to a string of restless wartime lovers, the comfort of cocker spaniels, the long voyage to start again in Rhodesia, and at last a second marriage that would endure for thirty-six years — Wendy in Wartime is a vivid, unflinching, often very funny portrait of a woman who refused to let history happen to her quietly.

Generously illustrated with verbatim quotations from the original diaries and letters, this is social history at its most intimate: a real life, told with novelistic flair by a writer celebrated for her Cotswold, Lake District and West Country mysteries.

And here's another...What you have built with Wendy in Wartime is a memoir that gives readers the Second World War as it was actually lived, not as it is usually remembered. Rather than another account of battles and headlines, you draw on Wendy's own gloriously frank diaries and three generations of preserved family letters to reconstruct a home front made of hasty weddings, ration coupons, dances at the airfield, and an unending lifeline of letters criss-crossing wartime Britain. That intimacy is exactly what makes this book unlike the wartime histories readers have already read, and a 4.0 star rating already tells you it is finding the right readers.

 What gives this book its unusual authority is the combination of primary source material and genuine novelistic skill. You are not reconstructing Wendy's war from secondhand accounts, you are working from her own verbatim words, and you bring the same narrative instinct that has made your Cotswold, Lake District, and West Country mysteries beloved to bestselling status. That pairing turns Wendy's story, from the early idyll in Scotland to ambulance driving on icy roads, from the devastating loss of Hugh in the Far East to a string of restless wartime lovers and an eventual second marriage that lasted thirty-six years, into something both historically rich and genuinely compelling to read. As Volume One of the Scorer Family Memoirs, it also opens the door for readers to continue with the family's story in Volume Two.

 Wendy in Wartime is Volume One of the Scorer Family Memoirs..   Other titles are 'Clare Takes Charge' and 'Sybil Survives'. Now also available is 'Eclipsing, Collapsing' which is Rebecca's personal account of the events of the year 2001.

BookDNA.com have done a lovely job of displaying the first book - have a look.

https://bookdna.com/best-books/books-about-women-their-letters-and-world-war-ii

 Some Personal Stuff

I grew up on farms, first in Cheshire, then in Devon. It was a childhood full of powerful elemental experiences, in a background of unspoken parental dstress in a painful marriage. Cruelty, death, frustration alternated with idyllic summer days, the teamwork of the harvest, the delight of the young animals. No two days were quite the same. Some of these memories have found their way into A Dirty Death, my first novel. I have lived in various parts of England since then - London and Sussex, before returning to the western side of the country. I now live in rural Herefordshire, on a smallholding situated close to the beautiful Black Mountains. I have a dog and a cat - the pigs I enjoyed so much are all gone now, leaving rather a gap. Their paddock is slowly being transformed into a wild garden, with trees, pond and lots of bamboo. 

I have four children and five grandchildren. Coming from large famiies on both sides, I have relatives everywhere, and have been enjoying reading old letters and diaries, family trees and memoirs, prompted by the acqusition of a mass of material when my mother died.

I blundered accidentally into writing crime fiction, and still wonder how it happened. It could just as easily have been historical, or sagas or even non-fiction. Indeed, I am currently trying my hand at two of those genres, as a change of pace. And I have large plans for a series of memoirs.              

I travel whenever possible, with France and Greece firm favourites. Plus America, Australia, Argentina...places with wide open roads and easy driving.

I give talks to libraries, groups and anyone else who might be interested.