About Barbara
How do you make God laugh? Make a plan. I studied acting in the classical theatre program (Shakespeare, Shaw, Moliere, Congreve, etc.) at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, planning a “distinguished stage career," and then spent the next twenty years acting mostly on television in made-for-TV movies, series, sit-coms, and soap opera. But I thoroughly enjoyed all that TV work, and I did use my stage training too, performing in dozens of plays across Canada and in the US. I loved being an actor.
A few highlights from my acting days:
“Vanities” with Dawn Wells (of “Gilligan’s Island”):
Stage West, Edmonton. Dawn became a good friend. |
“Ring Around the Moon” with Thayer David: Seattle Repertory Theatre |
“A Flea In Her Ear” with Wenna Shaw: Citadel Theatre, Edmonton |
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Neil Simon's “Chapter Two”: Bayview Playhouse, Toronto |
On the set of “The Campbells” TV series. I played Charlotte Logan, Inkeeper, for three seasons of this TV series about life in pioneer Canada in the 1880s.
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 Cover of TV Times with Bruce Gray, for “High Hopes." I starred in this daytime drama (aka soap opera). I loved doing this series.
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It felt like a natural extension of my acting to create characters for fiction. In 2008 Kensington Books published my first historical novel, The Queen’s Lady. Set in the court of King Henry VIII, "The Queen’s Lady" features Honor Larke, a (fictional) ward of (the real) Sir Thomas More. More was a brilliant scholar and a loving father, but as chancellor of England he banned books and burned men. My story turns on Honor’s passionate conflict with her once-beloved guardian as she tries to save More’s victims, enlisting rogue ship-captain Richard Thornleigh in her missions.
Readers found these characters so engaging, I wrote a sequel, The King’s Daughter, featuring Honor and Richard’s daughter, Isabel. When Henry VIII’s bitter daughter, Queen Mary, launches her reign with a vow to annihilate heretics, Isabel Thornleigh must act quickly to save her family. Determined to rescue her father from prison, she entrusts her mission, and herself, to a ruthless soldier of fortune, Carlos Valverde.
The Queen’s Captive came next. When Queen Mary releases her 20-year-old sister Princess Elizabeth from the Tower, hoping she'll make a false move and condemn herself, Honor Thornleigh returns from exile with Richard and their seafaring son, Adam, to help Elizabeth in the fight of her life. Playing a dangerous game as a double agent, aware that a false move of her own will expose her past as a condemned heretic, Honor finds her task made harder when Adam and Elizabeth fall in love. To save her family and Elizabeth, and herself, Honor must turn a headstrong princess into a queen before “Bloody Mary” destroys them all.
I’ve been delighted by the tremendous response from readers about my historicals, and hope everyone will enjoy even more my latest in this “Thornleigh” series, The Queen's Gamble. Isabel, the Thornleighs’ daughter, returns to London from the New World with her Spanish husband Carlos Valverde and their young son, and is swept up in the first international crisis of the young Queen’s Elizabeth reign: the French, who control Scotland, have landed troops along England’s border, threatening an invasion. The Queen recruits Isabel to take money secretly to aid the Scottish rebel faction trying to drive out the French. But when Carlos is sent to Scotland as a Spanish military adviser to the French troops, he and Isabel find they are on opposite sides in this deadly war – and the Queen has made their little boy her hostage.
I love writing about the Tudor/Elizabethan period, whose "on the make" characters and life-and-death intrigues – to say nothing of the era's religious paranoia – speak deeply to our own time. I hope you'll agree, and will enjoy being caught up in the passions and setbacks, adventures and strivings of the Thornleigh family – Honor, Richard, Isabel, and Adam – as they befriend, and sometimes betray, their willful kings and queens.
And, I'm so pleased to announce the e-publication of Entrapped, my new thriller. Entrapped is a novel of high stakes: life and death, love, and oil.
Set in Alberta, Canada, Entrapped is the story of Liv Gardner, an ambitious young oil executive intent on stopping farmer Tom Wainwright who is sabotaging her rigs after a spill of lethal “sour” gas poisoned his wife. Desperate to save the company she built, Liv plants evidence to frame Tom. But when the evidence is used to indict him for a murder, only Liv can save him.
“Kyle has peopled a landscape of smoke and poison and vast natural beauty with a cast of vivid characters, and none of them, from the slick oil baron to the vengeful radical to the not-quite-professional investigator are quite what they seem ... Many jolts and twists and turns that will leave no one unsatisfied.” - Giles Blunt, internationally acclaimed author of Crime Machine
At home with my daughter and husband - my best roles. These pictures are old but still cherished. (My beautiful and talented daughter has kids of her own now).
Happy reading!