Crime Writer Sam Blake

http://bloodredink.com/
The Dressmaker
Stephen King believes that the best plots develop when two unrelated ideas collide. The Dressmaker is a product of the collision of two seperate events that happened in 1935 and 1949. I heard about the first about ten years ago in an RTE documentary. It stayed with me until the second piece of the puzzle fell into place - as I was listening to the radio on the way back from Sarah Webb’s Readers’ Day at the Radisson Hotel. The two events had a significant common element, an element that started me thinking. Waiting to go in to a Book Club Lunch I started scribbling the plot and the relationships between the main characters on the back of a telephone bill….

The Dressmaker is a story of dark family secrets, of greed, betrayal and loss. Garda Detective Sergeant Cathy Connolly is attending a routine break-in when she finds something that is far from routine – a torn wedding dress, and a grisly secret hidden in its hem: the bones of a new born baby. The discovery is all the more shocking for Cathy as she is struggling with her own problems – she is 26, single - very single - and pregnant.


Paradise Gardens, Bethnal Green, London
Set in modern day Ireland, in Dalkey Co. Dublin, and in London’s East End, the web of lies spun around the wedding dress and its owners keeps Cathy and her friend and colleague DI Dawson O’Rourke, guessing until the explosive end.