Lost Summer by
Stuart Harrison
pbk out July 03
(HarperCollins)
at £6.99
Adam Turner, a successful investigative reporter, returns to the scene of his youth in
the north of Cumbria. What happened to him as a teenager shaped the rest of his life.
In particular, he is driven by the urge to rekindle his relationship with Angela, the girl
who abandoned him for his best friend, David. A complication is that he has always
suspected that David was implicated in the death of a teenage girl called Meg, even
though the official suspect, the father of David's friend Nick, was killed in a road
crash years ago. Adam's has been asked to look into another suspicious death, that of
Ben, a youthful eco-protester who was fighting against a proposed new development.
Before long the past and the present collide as Adam comes to believe that David may
also be involved in the death of Ben. The plot of this book is complicated and perhaps
over-elaborate. A bit of judicious cutting would have been welcome, since the reader
does get rather bogged down in Adam's painstaking enquiries. Nonetheless, Stuart
Harrison manages to maintain interest and offers a neat twist at the end.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
Lost Summer by
Stuart Harrison
