A darkly funny crime novel about later life frustrations and what happens when a sixty-nine-year-old woman refuses to accept what the world at large expects of her.

With her seventieth birthday looming, Carol cannot escape the sense that her life is quietly slipping into a grey nothingness. The hard years of raising a family on a shoestring are long past leaving her feeling bored, invisible and largely pointless.

Determined to prove to herself she’s more than the dull, predictable figure her family assume her to be, Carol goes in search of something to rekindle her spirit. What she finds is a spectacularly inappropriate new hobby – one that’s very naughty but utterly exhilarating and, to her surprise, it’s something she’s really good at.

As her confidence grows, Carol discovers a freedom she’s never known before and the more successful she becomes the harder it is to give up. But now, with the police closing in, she has to decide how far she’s prepared to go to cling on to her secret new life.

Ennes Bastin is a writer determinedly unconstrained by genre or style, his work ranging from the dark and sometimes deeply disturbing through commercial crime thrillers and cross-over fantasy to light whimsical humour and even outrageous comedy.

Qualified in both natural sciences and psychology Ennes spent his working years in corporate industry, travelling extensively and being fortunate enough to encounter a vast spectrum of people, settings and cultures that filled his head with ideas for fictional works. His ‘out of the blue’ decision to swap international commerce for the peace and tranquillity of a life deep in the glorious countryside of the Cheshire-Shropshire border finally gave him the time and space he needed to start writing them down.

When not at his word-processor Ennes spends his time hiking, enjoying theatre, watching live sports and listening to a bizarrely eclectic selection of music whilst endlessly grafting to maintain his rural homestead. He is also continuing, along with his artist wife, to travel far and wide, although his ever-escaping sheep and (thankfully) much better-behaved chickens, are nagging him to spend less time away. The resolutely insouciant cat, on the other hand, couldn’t give a fig.

May 2026: The Whitchurch Herald reports on the local connection for Ennes Bastin's The Red Fox Diaries here: link