While writing The Diamond Courier, I discovered the remarkable wartime history of Antwerp's Jewish diamond industry. What began as historical research became the inspiration for Lili Hamilton's story—a novel rooted in the quiet courage of the men and women who risked everything to smuggle diamonds out of occupied Belgium.

Following in SOE agent Lise de Baissac’s footsteps through Marseille took me from her former home overlooking the Vieux-Port to a street bearing her name that I couldn’t find — and finally to the graffiti-covered streets of Cours Julien, where history unexpectedly met my fiction.

I have loved Audrey Hepburn all my life — long before I knew she had been a ballerina, and a girl in the Dutch resistance. This is the story of how that lifelong love, and one astonishing fact, became The Crystal Butterfly.

Finding Henri Fiocca's grave in Marseille became an unexpected mission. With the help of a kind taxi driver and a determined cemetery clerk, I finally stood before the family tomb of the man who gave his life protecting Nancy Wake. It was the most moving moment of my entire research trip.

I expected Marseille to be full of reminders of Nancy Wake. Instead, I found a plaque almost nobody knew existed, a house that had vanished, and a city that seemed to have quietly moved on. Sometimes historical research is as much about what isn't there as what is.

Following Nancy Wake’s route from Fort Saint-Jean to Dr. Rodocanachi’s house in Marseille, I expected to find an address. Instead, I found a forgotten story, a helpful car mechanic named Mohammed, and a place that quietly changed the way I imagine one of Nancy Wake's wartime missions.

Two brothers, dead within eight days of each other — one at the bottom of the North Sea, one in the fields of northern France. How I traced my great-uncles through the war archives, and the cap emblem that finally led me to Jack.

One of the men shown in the 1916 Battle of the Somme footage could well have been my great-uncle, Private Jack Westcott. He never came home. Neither did his brother William. Here is how I found them — and why I had to write their story.

Visiting the places where Audrey Hepburn lived during WW2: Arnhem and Velp.

Visiting the places where Anne Frank lived during WW2 in Amsterdam.
Anne Frank's importance for the world stems from her powerful and poignant account of her life in hiding during the Holocaust, documented in her now-famous diary, "The Diary of a Young Girl." Why was the voice of a teenage girl so significant?

I invite you to join me on my field trip to Mussert’s Wall. Anton Mussert was the leader of the NSB. Learn more about World War 2 in Holland, about the Dutch NSB Party and Collaboration during WW2.