Writing engaging stories for women readers
J MARY MASTERS
(Judith)
Sample Chapters
Julia's Story
Book 1 in the Belleville Family series
The story begins ....
​
To unravel the secrets of Prior Park and its inhabitants, we must find a moment in time at which to begin the story. The time to begin is when Elizabeth Belleville’s children are reaching adulthood. The year is 1942. It is a warm day in late March, almost the end of summer in the southern hemisphere, although it hardly seems like it to Elizabeth Belleville who sits at her small, highly polished desk addressing envelopes in her elegant sloping handwriting, her task hampered by the perspiration that trickles down the hollow of her right palm.
She muses almost aloud that the first signs of spring would be appearing in Europe. She imagines a bluebell wood, the tiny fragile flowers merging into a mass of green and blue among sunlit trees. She does not imagine an England fighting for its very survival, where everything is rationed and life is grim and for many, futureless.
To Love, Honour and Betray
Book 1 in the Belleville Family series
The story continues .... it is now 1957
​
It was late afternoon and cool in the shadows of the house. William Belleville strode out the front door in search of his elder brother Richard whom he suspected of avoiding him, although he could see no reason why he should do so, yet the suspicion lingered.
The house at Prior Park had begun to show its age. A team of men was working methodically on its exterior. Unsightly scaffolding covered two sides of the grand house.
Return to Prior Park
Book 3 in the Belleville Family series
The story continues .... it is now 1958
​
There had been no happy Christmas for the Belleville family and now in the heat of January, Richard Belleville, together with his brother William and his sister Julia, stood silently side by side in front of their mother’s grave. Her name–Elizabeth Marianne Belleville–was etched deep into the newly erected white marble headstone. She had been just sixty years old. Beside her grave, the weathered headstone of her long dead husband had begun to lean as the dry ground cracked around it. Richard made a half-hearted attempt to stand it upright.
Heirs and Successors
Book 4 in the Belleville Family series
The story continues .... it is now 1968
​
As he lost consciousness, Paul Belleville’s last thoughts were of his father. The last image in his mind, his father’s diminishing figure standing on the tarmac as his small plane headed west into the bright clear day. The last sound he thought he would ever hear, the sickening crunch as his plane hit the ground hard.
First Born Son
Book 1 in the Philippe Duval series
​
​
As Philippe Duval, eminent surgeon, husband to Julia, father to Pippa, boarded the aeroplane that would take him back to the land of his birth, he had no inkling of what lay ahead of him, no foreknowledge of how his life was about to change forever. He had no way of knowing the journey, which began on a cold blustery winter’s day in Sydney, would mark the end of the life he had known.
