Read first entered my life when I was kneeling on the floor, doing a jigsaw puzzle with my young son. There was a passing reference to two female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and this piqued my curiosity enough that I Googled them. By the time I was halfway through the Wikipedia entry I had no doubt that I would write a novel about these pirates. But I’d never written historical fiction before, so what followed was several years of intense research (which, you’ll be relieved to know, extended far
