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  • Location: Otterey Saint Mary, Devon

The Burning Air

The Burning Air

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Someone can carry revenge for years, and wait until the perfect moment to carry it out

  • ISBN: 978-1444728347
  • Genre: Psychological

What you need to know before your trail

The MacBrides lead a cozy life of upper class privilege: good looks (more or less), a beautiful home, tuition-free education at the prestigious private school where Rowan is headmaster, an altruistic righteousness inherited from magistrate Lydia.

But when Rowan and his three grown children gather for the first time since Lydia’s passing at the family’s weekend home—a restored barn in the English countryside—, years of secrets surface, and they discover a stranger in their midst. A stranger who is convinced that Lydia was a murderer. A stranger who has been exacting vengeance upon the family for years without their ever knowing. And one who will threaten the youngest MacBride, baby Edie, and the clan’s memory of Lydia, shattering their world forever.

Travel Guide

“Saxby”/Ottery St Mary

The town of Saxby is fictional but the author explains that it’s based on Otterley St Mary where she did much of her research and learned about the festival of the Tar Barrels:

“The Tar Barrel tradition is hundreds of years old. The exact origins are unknown but probably started after the gunpowder plot of 1605.  Various alternative reasons suggested for burning barrels have included fumigation of cottages and as a warning of the approach of the Spanish armada”.

Otterey was only one of the many towns and villages across the country who take part in this tradition. It’s the only town in the country carrying full sized lighted tar barrels through the streets.

The entire feeling of the town and the barn where the family stay for a weekend are the most claustrophobic and isolating in a novel that you will ever read. The feeling that there is a great divide between rich and poor, the haves and the have nots, that a stranger may infiltrate themselves into a family without anyone knowing, that revenge can fester and grow into something unrecognisable. That whatever the setting is, the real one is inside the darkest recesses of the human mind.

Booktrail Boarding Pass:  The Burning Tide

Destination : Devon  Author/Guide: Erin Kelly  Departure Time: 2000s

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