Want to know how to kill someone? Ask a single person who has been let down with a bump. Hell hath no fury like any single person scorned, it seems.

I’ve now written eight whodunits (the eighth currently out with beta readers) and although the bodycount isn’t high per book, I’m running out of ideas – I’ve strangled, knifed, shot, bludgeoned, and poisoned my characters, dropped them out of sight to starve, hired hitmen, and set deaths up to look like suicides, what next?  I idly put the question to my singles website, which has a very interactive blogging section, and uncovered an unexpected vein of serious bloodthirstiness. Seems quite a few mature singles have brooded on opportunities missed and the sweet taste of revenge.

Not sure if I can use any of the surprisingly inventive options offered, because they’d be either too easy or too hard to solve, but I know one thing, I won’t be quite so quick to rush off to the next meet-up. Yikes.

One or two wrote to me privately rather than publicly chatting on the blog about their activities. Bit difficult to say socially you buried your own mum-in-law in the garden and built a rockery over her, even if the writer swore she died of natural causes and oh yes was definitely dead, don’t need a doctor to confirm these things. His wife of the time had reckoned she could continue to collect her mum’s pension if mum just dropped out of sight . . .

Funny old world we live in. Truth really will always be stranger than fiction, and I begin to wonder if I have enough imagination for this line of work. A whole bunch of amateurs throwing themselves into the problem with gusto, maybe the next book should be a DIY manual!