The Rotting Spot (Bruce and Bennett 1)

Author/Guide: Valerie Laws

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Skull hunting on the Northumberland coast

ISBN: 978-1906700102
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller

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What you need to know before your trail

The sea- lashed Northumbrian Coast is about to witness a gruesome discovery. Stonehead may seem like a nice northern seaside town but it hold secrets, secrets that some people need to keep hidden at all costs.

Lucy Seaton has just gone missing and her friend Erica Bruce is convinced that her disappearance is linked to that of Lucy’s cousin several years earlier. So much so that she decides to carry out some investigations of her own.

Someone seems to be collecting skulls, secrets and a lot more besides. Someone is getting away with murder

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Travel Guide

Skull hunters? In and around Northumberland? Luckily Stonehead is fictional as you certainly won’t want to visit it after this. It’s based on the much more friendly Seaton Sluice and Whitley Bay. Seaside towns which once had a heyday but now which are faded snaps of their former selves. Even the people here have particularly northern appearances – where setting and character mix with great effect:

‘teeth more ruined than a Roman wall’..

Erica Bruce is probably more plausible than most to go looking into a possible crime. She collects skulls for a hobby, having picked up the strange activity from Mickey. Mickey has already collected many animal skulls and he leaves them in ‘ the rotting spot’ so that the skin etc falls away leaving just the skull. As gory as it sounds really, and it soon appears that a human skull may just be the ultimate prize for the committed skull hunter.

Secrets within families and skeletons within closets provide the real setting of the mystery of the disappearance.

The link between the two disappearances – Lucy and her cousin Molly – is to reveal itself as gradual as that skin slipping off the bone. And all in the North East where “Aye mint that’s hardcore”