Going Down [Paperback]

Going Down- 'Warm, witty, sexy and compulsively readable'

It means Mischief- 'An irresistible and beguiling romp through the romance and intrigue of the Irish thespian underworld'

More Mischief- 'A funny, romantic and gloriously escapist read'

'Kate Thompson's novels are sublimely addictive – insightful, stylish, romantic and funny'

Another cheeky romp that follows the trials and tribulations of Ella Nesbit, a young Irish girl and intrepid scuba-diver.

Ella Nesbit is young, good-looking and has a wicked way with the violin. She also has a great job working in a Dublin recording studio. So why isn't life more fun? Could Julian, the trainee from hell, have something to do with it? Or is it really due to Ella's unreciprocated passion for her boss?

When Ella's granny wins a holiday for two in Jamaica, things start to look up. Intrepid Ella dons a wetsuit, discovers scuba, and learns something about life from Rastafarian Raphael. But closer to home, a dark horse is coming up on the outside...

In this brilliant, bubbly and sexy tale from the bestselling author of More Mischief, Ella eventually discovers what she really, really wants - and finds a sensational way to get it.

Ella Nesbit is young, good-looking and has a wicked way with the violin. She also has a great job working in a Dublin recording studio. So why isn't life more fun? Could Julian, the trainee from hell, have something to do with it? Or is it really due to Ella's unreciprocated passion for her boss?

When Ella's granny wins a holiday for two in Jamaica, things start to look up. Intrepid Ella dons a wetsuit, discovers scuba, and learns something about life from Rastafarian Raphael. But closer to home, a dark horse is coming up on the outside...

In this brilliant, bubbly and sexy tale from the bestselling author of More Mischief, Ella eventually discovers what she really, really wants - and finds a sensational way to get it.

Kate Thompson was born in Belfast. She came to Dublin to study French and English and had a successful career as an actress and voice-over artist before ditching the day job to write full-time. Her novels, It Means Mischief, More Mischief, Going Down, The Blue Hour (shortlisted for the Parker award in 2003), Striking Poses, A Perfect Life, Living the Dream and Sex, Lies and Fairytales, have been widely translated. Kate has had a ninth novel - Hard to Choos - published under her pen-name Pixie Pirelli. She divides her time between Dublin and the West of Ireland, is happily married with one daughter and is currently working on her tenth novel.

For more information on Kate Thompson and her books, visit her website at:

www.kate-thompson.com

Chapter One Endorphins! Those were exactly what she needed! Ella Nesbit was sitting on the white Formica counter of the small coffee room, swinging her legs and waiting for the coffee to perk. She had filched a magazine from the selection she had fanned out on the glass-topped table in reception earlier, and was idly leafing through the pages. There was a feature in the health section about these things called endorphins that supposedly triggered a chemical reaction in your brain to produce a natural high. Apparently these endorphins kicked in when you were feeling good about yourself and enjoying life - like when you were eating chocolate, or when you'd finished a workout in the gym. The chocolate thing she could understand, the gym thing she couldn't. 'Endorphins are also generated by great sex,' she read. 'And every time you laugh spontaneously, you experience an endorphin rush.' No wonder she was feeling so bloody sorry for herself lately. Not only had she not had great sex - she hadn't had any sex for months. And she couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed spontaneously. The coffee was done. She poured herself a mug, wandered back out into the reception area of the recording studio where she worked, and tossed the magazine onto the table. The calendar needed changing. She hadn't done it for ages. Now here was an ideal opportunity to experiment with endorphins! There were at least five Gary Larson cartoons waiting to be torn off. She studied the first one. Nul points for endorphins. It was the same with the second. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Either the meister cartoonist had lost his touch, or she had become terminally challenged in the humour department. What scared her most was that she was starting to feel an increasing empathy with Larson's losers. One of her recent favourites showed a bunch of sad individuals mooching around in a hell so hellish the demons even served up cold coffee. It was strange. On last year's calendar she'd identified herself more readily with his smiley, doolally cartoon characters. She dumped the cartoons in the wastepaper basket, and was just about to pick up the phone to confirm the availability of a voice-over artist for later that afternoon, when it rang. 'Nesbit & Noonan, good morning!' she said in her best receptionist's voice. She actually wasn't a receptionist, she was a sound engineer, but since Hattie the real receptionist had run off with a Scottish radio producer, she'd been roped in to man the desk. She hated it, but she hadn't much choice. Her Uncle Patrick - who was the Nesbit part of Nesbit & Noonan - had taken a trainee sound engineer on board a couple of months ago, and he was running a tight ship. Until Patrick could afford to fork out a salary for a new receptionist, Ella was doing him a favour by standing in. And she owed him more than just one favour. Her uncle was her mentor, her friend, her port in a storm. For most of her life he had acted in loco parentis when one or both of Ella's parents were in globe-trotting mode - which was more often than not. The walls of the spare bedroom in the house he shared with his two teenage sons and his wife Claudia were still covered in her embarrassing Bros posters, and she sometimes found herself automatically scribbling in her uncle's address instead of her own on any forms she had to fill in. She loved him fiercely, and Patrick in turn doted on her, treating her like the daughter he'd never had. Patrick had booked conjurers for her birthday parties when she was little, he had bawled out Ms Nm Bhriain, her Irish language teacher, for undermining Ella's confidence at school, and he had organized orthodontia when her teeth started to grow skew-whiff. He had picked her up from teenage discos, assessed her boyfriends with a hypercritical eye, steered her ever so subtly away from the jail-bait look that some of her schoolfriends adopted, and nursed her through her first head-exploding, gut-heaving, I-will-never-drink-again-as-long-as-I-live-hangover. Ella suspected that he had done the Daddy stuff miles better than Declan, her own father, ever could have. Declan would have let her kick up her heels and run wild - in fact, the more sand she sent flying in the face of convention, the more he would have sat back and looked on admiringly. It was Patrick's voice now on the other end of the phone.