There must have been some mistake…

TV presenter Carrie Kent can’t believe the voice on the end of the phone. Surely it didn’t just say that her son – her beloved son Max – had been stabbed within his school gates? This sort of thing happens only to the guests on her daily morning chat show. Not to someone like her boy.

But when Carrie arrives at the hospital and learns that Max is dead, she is thrown into a nightmare. No one will reveal what really happened and the only witness, a schoolgirl, is refusing to talk. Carrie must enter an unknown world of fear and violence if she wants to find out the truth. But can she live with what she discovers?

Languishing a good few rungs below Keith Chegwin and Su Pollard on the showbiz ladder, but above that scouse bloke who won the first series of  Big Brother, minor TV personality Simon Peters feels he’s doomed to a career in the celebrity limbo of daytime game shows and home shopping channels.

He never seems to be invited to the right parties and invariably sleeps with all the wrong people; his agent has trouble remembering his name and even his stalker is more famous than he is. And just when things couldn’t get any worse (and let’s be honest, who’s ever won a BAFTA playing panto in Grimsby?) the plug is pulled on his TV show and stardom beckons his worst enemy.

But, however riddled with insecurities he may be, Simon knows he’s got what it takes to make it,  and he’s not going to let a silly little thing like a complete lack of talent get in the way.

Giving fame a long overdue (but not too hard) slap on the wrist, Diary of a C-List Celeb is a wickedly funny, deliciously observed novel of burning ambition, unrequited love, celebrity punch-ups and serial bad dressing by a new literary talent who knows this world all too well.