I have a confession to make - I have a serious addiction. Put me in the basement of museum or the archives of a library and I behave worse than a four year old kid left alone in a toy shop. If I trip over the smallest hint of an intriguing real-life story in history, I have to follow that story just to find out what happened. Even when I know it has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be researching for my next novel. I can't help myself. I scoff stories from history, like chocoholic left alone with a giant box of chocolates.

And that's really how my new ebook short , Wicked Children , began. If you've read some of my novels, you'll know I have created some nasty children in a few of my novels, and I'm often asked whether they are based on real children. I think many people want to believe that deep down children are, in the words of the nursery rhyme, 'sugar and spice and all things nice'.

But during my research for these novels, I've stumbled across some real-life cases of children in history who have brought about the deaths of adults in some pretty ruthless ways. We all know about the mischief the children at Salem caused when they started to accuse innocent men and women of being witches, which was immortalised in the play The Crucible, so it is easy to forget the lesser known cases of children who played those witch games in England and Europe too, revelling in the power they had to bring about the imprisonment and deaths of innocent adults.

But I found some children in history who didn't simply manipulate adults into playing their games, they actually committed murder themselves. We like to think that if a child does kill, they do it accidentally, a game that went too far - they didn't realise what the consequences would be. But one of stories I came across of a 14 year old girl in London who quite coldly and deliberately planned the murder of her godmother and her godmother's sister, shows that some knew exactly what they were doing. We often blame social media or computer games for turning children into killers, but all of the stories I researched happened centuries before phones, films or computers had even been dreamed of.

The historical novelist Liz Harris who wrote The Road Back and The Lost Girl, talked about the history that appears on the page of the novel being only the tip of the iceberg of the research that supports it, which the reader never sees, which I think is an excellent way of describing it. So for once, I am really delighted to be able to expose just a bit more of that iceberg in Wicked Children: Murderous Tales from History. Or maybe, it just stops me feeling quite so guilty about all those hours I spent crouched behind dusty library shelves secretly pigging out on those illicit tales.