Emma Dakin joins us today on her Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour!
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Crime in Cornwall by Emma Dakin
Crime in Cornwall (British Book Tour Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Publisher: Camel Press (October 13, 2020)
Paperback: 228 pages
ISBN-10: 1603816100
ISBN-13: 978-1603816106
Patrick and Rita Stonning, Claire’s neighbors in Ashton-on-Tinch, dash down from London on weekends to host loud parties. They work in a publishing house and use their Ashton semi-detached home as a break from big city stress. Patrick arrives at Claire’s door distraught, reporting one of his partygoers, Olive Nott a best-selling author, dead. Claire discovers that not only is he dead, he’s been murdered.
Patrick is suspected of the murder and has enough motive to satisfy the police. Nott wrote mysteries set in Cornwall and had planned to take his lucrative contracts to a competing company. His latest book dealt with smuggling in the caves of Cornwall. The police, including DI Mark Evans from the newly formed Major investigations Team wonder if he learned too much from his research. Claire takes her six tourists, most from America, to the Cornwall coast in search of sites of mystery novels and hears the opinions of the Cornish people on smuggling.
She asks Patrick to meet her in Penzance to give a guest lecture on the smuggling in Oliver Nott’s novels. Claire finds Patrick self-aggrandizing and arrogant but doesn’t agree he would murder and sets out to find the one responsible.
Purchase Link – Amazon, B&N & IndieBound
Crime in Cornwall the British Book Tour Mysteries Book 2
Writing a Series: Guest Post by Emma Dakin
Crime in Cornwall has just been released.
As writers of series know, that means I wrote it over a year ago. I still like it, and I still enjoy talking about it. It seems some time ago that I did the research and created the characters. They have settled in my mind as real people and when I return to Cornwall, I almost expected to meet them on the streets of St. Ives.
The energy I put into researching and writing the book creates a package in some part of my mind where I can visit it and find everyone still engaged in the mystery.
But I have written Book III, Perils in Yorkshire lived through the editing, done the revisions on it and waved goodbye to it as it moved to the publishing house.
Again, when I returned to Yorkshire, I had my friends searching through the streets of Whitby looking for a particular restaurant and piling out of the van on the moor searching for a good place to put a body. That book is in its own place in my mind complete with the characters that inhabit the book.
I have the rough draft completed on Danger in Edinburgh. My brain is a bit crowded.
One of the difficulties of writing a series is the proliferation of bodies in one small village.
While I’m happy to accept that in other people’s series, I didn’t want to be restricted to one village in mine. Clare Barclay, the protagonist, lives in the small village of Aston-on-Tinch in Hampshire with her dog, Gulliver.
The first book in the series Hazards in Hampshire is set there and in the area around Hampshire. Readers get a thorough view of the village in this first book and the characters who inhabit it. It is the grounding book and Claire refers to her village in subsequent books, but she is a tour guide. That means she travels throughout Britain with her guests. Each book has a new setting.
Claire takes her guests to Cornwall in Book 2, Yorkshire and the surrounding area in Book 3 and Edinburgh and parts of western Scotland in Book 4.
Because Claire’s work takes her to different areas, the readers get a changing setting. Those different settings allow me to conduct interesting research and experience new dialects, attitudes and landscapes. I can go from the Queen’s Hotel in Penzance, where, bless them, they allowed me to photograph the interior, to a farm in Yorkshire. I can explore the hotels in Fowey (pronounced Foy, truly) and the Whiski Bar in Edinburgh. Claire brings those experiences to the books.
Claire’s tour business also allows me as the writer of the series to bring in new characters for each book as Clare welcomes a new set of tourists for each tour and therefore for each book. The main characters Claire, her lover Mark, her sister Deidre and her family, her sisters-in-law and the people of her village remain the same. The new characters, the tourists on each tour, provide vitality and help move the plot forward.
Aside from Detective Inspector Mark Evans, the police are new characters in each book as well. I am particularly fond of Superintendent Tregere who is decidedly a Cornishman. I like to give the reader the flavor of the accent, in this case the Cornish dialect, without bogging down the reading with too much of it. I find Dorothy Sayers, that marvel of the cozy, to become incomprehensible in her efforts to write a dialect.
The times were different when she was writing, so perhaps readers were willing to decipher it in those days, but I’m not, so I don’t expect you to be willing to do that. I hope that I have given enough of Tregere’s particular way of speaking so you can imagine him as a Cornishman. I’d quite like to meet him.
Do I get bored with my characters? Not at all. They don’t stay the same. Like most people, they change as they learn from experience and from the characters around them. They surprise me at times. I’m not sure what they have in store.
If you would like to know more about The British Book Tour series go to my website emmadakinauthor.com and click on the Join My Newsletter button. I send out information once a month. If everything is working properly, and the gremlins that haunt computers are latent, you should get a free chapter of a book when you join.
Emma Dakin
Emma Dakin lives in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.
She has over twenty-five trade published books of mystery and adventure for teens and middle-grade children and non-fiction for teens and adults.
Her love of the British countryside and villages and her addiction to cozy mysteries now keep her writing about characters who live and work in those villages.
She introduces readers to the problems that disturb that idyllic setting.
To learn more about Emma, click on her name, photo, or any of the following links: Facebook & Goodreads
Visit all the stops along Emma’s Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour!
November 9 – I’m All About Books – SPOTLIGHT
November 9 – Author Elena Taylor’s Blog – GUEST POST
November 10 – The Pulp and Mystery Shelf – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
November 10 – Maureen’s Musings – SPOTLIGHT, RECIPE
November 11 – My Reading Journeys – REVIEW
November 11 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
November 12 – Ascroft, eh? – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
November 13 – Book Club Librarian – REVIEW
November 14 – Literary Gold – SPOTLIGHT, EXCERPT
November 15 – Cozy Up With Kathy – CHARACTER GUEST POST
November 16 – My Journey Back – SPOTLIGHT, RECIPE
November 16 – Books a Plenty Book Reviews – REVIEW, GUEST POST
November 17 – Mysteries with Character -AUTHOR INTERVIEW
November 17 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – REVIEW, CHARACTER GUEST POST
November 18 – Ruff Drafts – SPOTLIGHT
November 19 – Reading, Writing & Stitch-Metic – SPOTLIGHT, EXCERPT
November 19 – Here’s How It Happened – SPOTLIGHT
November 20 – StoreyBook Reviews – GUEST POST
November 21 – Readeropolis – SPOTLIGHT
November 21 – Reading Is My SuperPower – SPOTLIGHT, EXCERPT
November 22 – I Read What You Write– CHARACTER GUEST POST
November 22 – eBook Addicts – REVIEW
Elena Taylor is the author of All We Buried, available now in print, e-book, and audio book format at all your favorite on-line retailers. And don’t forget many independent bookstores can order books for you and have them shipped to your home or for curbside pickup.
For more information on All We Buried, click on the link here to visit the home page.