Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Staring a new life in the Lake District just seems so perfect, doesn’t it?
2000s: Staring a new life in the Lake District just seems so perfect, doesn’t it?
Daniel Kind and his partner Miranda really want to escape to a new life and so when they find Tam cottage in Brackdale, they start to believe that their dream could at last become true. They look forward to getting to know their neighbours but it’s the ones that lived in the house before that might be causing them the real problems. It’s someone who once died there however who is going to cause the biggest problem of all
Brackdale might be fictional but the idea of moving to a lovely village in the lakes and finding the cottage of your dreams is certainly something that many people would kill for. Well some literarily as it turns out for Tam cottage here was once the home of Barrie Gilpin, who is suspected of a savage murder…. now some people wouldn’t mind living in a house where a murderer suspected or otherwise once lived, or even where someone died, but it’s not the best start to a new life is it?
Daniel is particularly fascinated with the cottage as he knew it as a boy. It’s something that has always scared him and excited him at the same time. A place so remote that legend has it that if someone died, their body had to be carried over the hills and dips on a horse and cart. Named the Coffin Trail, this is a place that the dead are still supposed to wander and not surprisingly, the legends and folklore surrounding the area provide stories many many years later.
The landscape is as wild as the stories, the stories providing one literary reference after another – in the land of Wordsworth that is no bad thing. And all the while, the thunder of the carts on the Coffin trail continue to haunt the land…
Clare
Read this for booktrails within a booktrail as there are many literary references to other books set in the area that you’l just have to wander into a local bookshop and buy them. Brackdale might be fictional but the whole idea of the Coffin Trail was just chilling. I think I’m attracted to the folklore and supernatural mood of the book and the fact that such an iconic place could have a tragic history. As is the first in the series, there are things that I need to know now and felt were lacking about the characters but then again I need to read the other ones to really decide. I did like Daniel and DCI Scarlett but didn’t care much for Miranda. Stil quite keen to see where the story goes in the future though.