Fire Brand. Diana Palmer

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       www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

      It is so fascinating to read a book that I wrote over thirty years ago and to see firsthand how much the world has changed in that time.

      When this book was written, I was working for a weekly newspaper and stringing (doing local news and features) for a daily newspaper. What you read is how newspaper reporting was done thirty years ago. The terminology, the way people dress, even the cars they drove, like Bowie’s Scorpion—which was a fantastic, and expensive, new car in the 1980s—is all history now.

      Smoking was also a daily habit for me and millions of other people. We smoked in restaurants, in hospital rooms, in emergency rooms, on airplanes, anywhere we liked to. I smoked at my desk in the newspaper office. Everyone that I knew also smoked, including both my parents. These days, smoking is so taboo that I’m not even allowed to have a character who smokes in my books. However, I was adamant to leave this element in the book, to show things as they truly were back in the eighties, and my publisher obliged.

      I hope you enjoy this walk through time in this early work of mine. It serves as a lesson in how life has changed, and changed us. I am a person out of place and time. The world I knew, and grew up in, is gone. I have to live in the one that exists, but I am not really happy in it. My grandfather saw the Rockettes on television when he was seventy years old. He rushed to shut it off. It offended him that women showed so much of their bodies. It amused me at the time—I was sixteen—but I am now nearing seventy, and I understand how he felt.

      For better or worse, here is the book. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoy it. And God bless everyone!