Thirty-three-year-old romance novelist Penelope Eames moves to Spain to avoid her oppressive father and drug-addicted brother, Dermot. When she meets Ramon, a young Spanish school teacher, she is immediately attracted to him and feels the happiness that eluded her all her life may at last be hers. However, she receives a distress call from Dermot saying he is at the mercy of Charlie Eliot, a pimp and drug dealer on the Costa.

Ramon, whose mother was killed by a drug addict, tells her to have nothing to do with Charlie Eliot. Penelope must decide: Is she prepared to compromise herself with Charlie Eliot and jeopardize her chance of happiness with Ramon for the sake of her drug-addicted brother?

Author's note: Apart from casting a wry glance at the phenomenon of chick-lit and treating of the role of patriarchy in a family, the novel Finding Penelope is essentially a love story marking a growth in self-realization in the protagonist Penelope Eames. It delves into the drug culture and its associated criminality in Spain (where a lot of Celtic Tiger money wound up laundered), Ireland, and the UK. The prompt for the novel was from Cervantes, and a motif may be interpreted as a sort of modern-day parallel of Don Quijote's attack on the proliferation of romance novels of that time. As 70 percent of fans are now female, I wanted to understand more of the female mindset. So I picked the brains of women of my acquaintance, including two adult daughters, and I researched contemporary women writers and books like Everywoman, and I reread with new female (or at least androgynous eyes) my well-thumbed de Beauvoir, Anna Karenina, and Portrait of a Lady. Simultaneously, I was studying the crime culture on the Costa. The result was the character Penelope Eames.