| Chills and thrills were on the menu at Rotary's evening meeting at the Odney Club on Monday, served by our guest speaker David Palin and his partner Sarah Mayhew. David, who was born in London and has lived in both Cookham and Maidenhead before he moved to Wokingham, is a master of dark psychological thrillers. To date he has had eleven books published and more are in the pipeline. He believes his interest in dark and mysterious things started in early childhood, inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales and exotic tales told by his parents from their time growing up in India. Although David penned a manuscript already in his early 20s, he chose a career in a large chemical company in Germany. | It was only through a colleague's insistence that he dusted off the old manuscript and had it converted into a book – twenty five years after it was first written! That became the kick off for a change of direction and a renewed enthusiasm for creating hair-raising, bone-chilling new thrillers. David gets inspiration through long walks as his ideas can then brew and be recorded into his phone. So far he has never been affected by writer's block or run out of ideas – or as he so eloquently expresses it: "What inspires me to write is the co-existence of different worlds; the darkness of the past living alongside the shadows of the present and the future." |