The Davies & West mystery series is set in contemporary Cornwall. I love this far southwestern tip of England, a county studded with Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age monuments and settlements, many maintained by the Cornwall Ancient Sites Protection Network (CASPN), a dedicated group of mostly pagan believers in this magical place, several of whom have become my friends.
After a long career as a nonfiction writer and ghostwriter, I have a passion for accuracy, even in fiction, and in this I have been aided throughout the Davies & West series by a splendid team of local advisers, especially former Scene of Crimes Detective Sergeant Martin South and former Criminal Investigation Division Detective Sergeant Tessa Adams. Additional advisers to the series include other CID detective inspectors; Forensic Pathologist Dr. Amanda Jeffers; County Senior Archaeologist James Gossip and his volunteers in the Meneage Archaeology Group, who keep unearthing new ancient sites; and the staff at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, among others. I owe a special note of thanks to chef, restauranteur, author, culinary entrepreneur, and hotelier Rick Stein for his generosity in letting me make him and his Padstow restaurant part of a scene in this book.
Thanks, once again, to my eagle-eyed early readers/critics: Claire Booth in the UK, and Kate Pflaumer, Jo Hollingsworth, Lawrence Rosenfeld, and Stephanie Konat in the US, and also to my friend Nicolina Miller who made sure my Italian was accurate. And finally, a deep bow of gratitude to the entire creative team at Northstar Editions: my project manager and steadfast advisor, Stephanie Konat; gifted cover designer Laura Hidalgo, book formatting genius Adam Bodendieck, and Patricia Eddy, proofreader extraordinaire.
Will North
June 2017