Wareham holds a special place in my heart.

When I was nine years old, my parents bought a caravan at the Redcliffe Caravan Park, at the top of a hill a mile or so upriver from Wareham. I spent many happy weekends and summers there. Cycling the back lanes, walking the towpath into town to go grocery shopping, eating fish and chips from the Chipperies while sitting on the edge of the quay, legs dangling over the River Frome below...

And when I gave Lesley a cottage in one of Wareham's narrow streets (between the Duke of Wellington pub and St Mary's Church, see if you can work out the address), I felt I'd done the town a disservice.

Because Lesley isn't keen on Wareham. Dorset Police have allocated her a low-ceilinged cottage, a home that’s rented for the six months of her secondment to the county, and at first it's supposed to be no more than a base, a place to rest her head between shifts at Dorset Police HQ not far away in Winfrith. Between work and weekend trips home to Birmingham, she doesn’t expect to spend much time there.

But when things go pear-shaped in Birmingham and she realises she's going to have to make a home in Dorset, she soon starts to hate that cottage.

Let's face it: Lesley is a city girl. She's a born and bred Brummie who lives in Edgbaston, a leafy suburb closer to the city centre than leafy suburbs really have a right to be. It’s bad enough that she’s suffering from PTSD. It’s even worse when that PTSD means she has to move 150 miles away from her friends, colleagues and daughter. But when she’s forced to live in a pokey cottage along a narrow lane in a sleepy market town she's never heard of, it’s fair to say she's not best pleased.

And as we all know, Lesley is very good at being grumpy.

So in book 7 of the series, The Blue Pool Murders, I wanted to paint Wareham and the surrounding area in a better light.

And that isn't hard.

The book opens at the Blue Pool, a little-known and underrated beauty spot between Wareham and Corfe Castle. A young couple, seeking some time away from family, head there for a stroll... and (as they’d have expected if they’d read any of the books themselves) find a body.

I've been to the Blue Pool many, many times. It has a landscape and a natural environment that is unique in the area. And the sense of calm and otherworldliness that it exudes makes it the perfect place to dump a body.

(And this isn't just any old body...)

The Blue Pool is the site of an abandoned clay quarry, with astonishing blue-green of the pool itself (more of a lake, really) deriving from the refraction of light from the tiny particles of clay suspended in the water.

As well as being unique visually, the woodland surrounding the pool is also rather special aurally. Most of the Purbeck landscape is covered in heathland. Purple and yellow gorse flowers, contrasting with the dark green foliage and the blue of the sea and sky beyond.

But the woodland surrounding the Blue Pool is coniferous. And the ground is covered in fallen pine needles. And I mean covered. In places, the ground is so thick with needles that when you walk, you bounce.

It all gives the place a rather surreal atmosphere. The tall trees block out sound from the outside world, the surface layer of needles muffles the echo of footsteps, and the fact that the whole place is located in a huge dip which originally formed the quarry only adds to the effect.

It's beautiful. If you haven't been, I recommend it.

And I also recommend reading about it!