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I was lucky enough to have my first novel 'BLOOD ON THEIR PETTICOATS' published by Olympia Publishers, and would love people to read it and send me feedback.

Details can be 'Googled' and it is on sale at several online bookshops. It took over 3 years to write with a great deal of research. I am now writing another novel with the 'interesting'  and unimaginative title of 'MUD ON THEIR PETTICOATS'. They are both about the Crimean War.

MY PUBLISHER'S PRESS RELEASE: 

Born in Solihull in 1941 Gerry Humphries was schooled privately, her favourite subjects being History, Geography and English. She worked as a Secretary/Bookkeeper and later as a Fitness Instructor. During her teenage years she became Midland breaststroke and butterfly champion, eventually switching to fencing, travelling internationally and attracting media interest whilst being Britain's number three until illness ended training. She began writing after reading a poorly researched historical novel. Her first short story was published in a local newspaper, the second won a competition and third went into a hardback anthology published by ‘New Fiction'. Her interest in history, particularly Victorian, inspired this debut novel with others to follow. She is Chairperson and Secretary of Castle Writers, a successful self help group who meet weekly at Dudley Library which includes many locally published writers, two others having books published in their own name. Single-handedly she has published several anthologies for the group. One son, Jan, who was born in 1966 and educated at Old Swinford Hospital School, Stourbridge, is a senior lecturer of archaeology at Newcastle University with many academic publications to his name. Gerry is a companion to three cats living in Netherton, West Midlands.

For Isobel Spry the war in the Crimea meant only one thing at first - her lover Edmund was a surgeon there, working in the hospitals, operating on soldiers back from the battlefields. Having had a little experience in nursing, she decides to accompany and assist Florence Nightingale in tending to the sick and wounded. But what she finds there is far beyond what her genteel sensibilities could imagine. Throughout the story her strong sense of justice is challenged at every turn as she tackles mysterious goings-on in the hospital, a rival for her lover's affections and even the cover up of a murder. Gerry Humphries accurately evokes the upheaval and turmoil of the time, when the battlefield hospitals were being overhauled, and where good sense, hard work and a caring nature would always win through. A beautifully written historical novel that recalls with pin-point accuracy the heart-rending adventure a young woman experiences to find love in the most extraordinary of circumstances.