Half a Pound of Tuppenny Rice

Author/Guide: David Coubrough

Why a Booktrail?

1972: Cornwall sounds ideal for a lovely idyllic family holiday. Doesn’t it?

ISBN: 978-0720618815
Genre: Cosy crime, Mystery

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What you need to know before your trail

St Ives is for many years the perfect spot for a group of families to all get together. For a while, life is good, the country air fresh and the holiday feeling well and truly alive. But in 1972, their lives are shattered when something happens resulting in them never meeting up again.

Hotel porter, Tom Youlen, is found poisoned in a country lane, muttering something about someone from the hotel wanting his silence. When a woman’s body is later found washed up on the shore, the dubious links to the strange affair start to weave their way into everyones minds.

Years later one of the group returns as he’s had a niggling doubt that he just has to put to bed. He comes searching for the truth but the question is, is he ready for it. Is anyone?

Locations

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Travel Guide

St Ives, the village of Zennor, Mevagissey

This is the St Ives, the village of Zennor, Mevagissey and the holiday feel of Cornwall as a whole with a 1970s vibe and a 1970s soundtrack playing away in the background.

The town is portrayed as if Agatha Christie is, at any moment about to pop her head over one of the many stone walls and announce the culprit. Life here is quiet and simple, rural and remote from the noisy big cities. But however postcard perfect it is, there’s a hidden menace coiling its tentacles along its twisty narrow cobbled streets, in the water, and hidden in plain sight.
This is a place where the characters and the setting are almost as one:

“His face looked as if it had been chiselled from the craggy rocks that edged the nearby Cornish shoreline”

For this booktrail, we understand it’s customary to wear platform shoes, flares, oink sunglasses and sing along to the songs which will undoubtedly sound in your head’