Local Resistance

Jane G Harlond
Works of: Fiction, Audiobook

Porthferris is a little village with a lot of secrets, some more sinister than others, and one that could change the history of the nation.

Make Do and Murder on the Home Front during World War II . . .

On a stormy night in 1941, Maisie Rose Hawkins leaves her drunken husband out in the rain – and he disappears. Detective Sergeant Bob Robbins, brought back into the Police from retirement, and young PC Laurie Oliver, straight out of school, go to investigate. Stan’s small fishing boat has gone, the rope sawn through.

As Bob investigates, he learns what is really going on in this small Cornish village, where everyone knows everything about everybody, but nobody quite knows the truth. An axe-wielding farmer threatens the much-hated wartime Food Inspector, Archibald Bantry; shopkeepers and the publican are evading rationing more quietly. This is a community steeped in the ancient art of smuggling, and the missing Stan Hawkins has a sea-cave full of black-market goods.

Bob’s original task to find Hawkins becomes entangled in war-profiteering then murder. The odious Bantry has a fatal car-crash and his wife dies a week later. The car crash is suspicious; the death of the wife a clear case of poisoning. Everyone disliked them, but who disliked them enough to commit murder?

Then Bob stumbles on what is happening in the disused copper mine, Wheal Marie, which changes everything. According to young PC Oliver nothing ever happens in Porthferris – he couldn’t be more wrong.

“uncanny happenings and warm characterization . . . The realities of wartime life in this novel combine with a lovely sense of place to create a distinctly Cornish mixture of secluded charm and the unsettlingly mysterious.”

Robert Wilton, prize-winning author of the Comptrollerate-General historical thrillers

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