28Nov

Meet The Family: Suzanne

• Saved in: My Blog
• by Elizabeth Ducie

In the past two months, Meet The Family has featured Gorgito and Emma, the main protagonists in my prize-winning debut novel Gorgito’s Ice Rink. We will return to meet other characters from that novel next year. Today, I want to introduce you to Suzanne Jones, one of the three strong women who feature in Counterfeit!, the first in my series of thrillers set in the sometimes murky world of international pharmaceuticals.

Suzanne Hilary Jones was born in Devon in 1966, making her 38 when we first meet her. She was named for her two grandmothers. Growing up, her nickname was SuSu; this was the name Charlie found easier to pronounce than Suzanne. She has brown eyes and long, fine straw blonde hair. Her skin is porcelain white and she needs to take care not to get burned in the sun. She is generally fit, but her lifestyle pushes her towards unhealthy eating on occasion. One reader of Counterfeit! pointed out she and Charlie eat far too many curries. This might be a problem for her waistline, but she rushes around so much that she burns off all the extra calories. Her favourite meal when returning from an overseas trip is brown bread and watercress sandwiches.

She dresses in cool colours, such as ice blue or mint green. She hates brown, which she associates with school uniform and her time in the Brownies. She listens to a lot of jazz but also loves Tchaikovsky. She can’t stand traditional folk music, which she dismisses as unmelodious and pretentious.

Her book shelves contain a preponderance of classics from Jane Austen to D H Lawrence. But she has read Watership Down seven times – and cries every time.

She has a driving license, but living in London, doesn’t have a car. She prefers to walk where possible, but will take a taxi, or the bus, for longer distances. She hates the Underground.

Suzanne would describe herself as cautious, but has a tendency to be unaware of danger around her and can therefore get into difficult situations without realising it.

When she was eleven years old, their Great Aunt took Charlie and Suzanne on holiday to the Red Sea. She saw fish and coral for the first time and realised that swimming was about much more than doing lengths in the local baths or splashing about in the cold waters of the Jurassic Coast. She has been hooked on diving ever since.

She has been buying vinyl records ever since she was ten, using her weekly pocket money plus birthday presents. When CDs became popular, she ignored the change in technology and still has the old record player her parents bought her for her fifteenth birthday, although she tends to use more state of the art equipment for playing her precious collection.