One of the advantages of being a small, indie publisher is that we can make decisions fast and act on them straight away. Less than two weeks ago, we published the paperback and Kindle e-book versions of author Mark Coady’s debut novel, Lying Beneath, with the promise that a hardback version would follow if there was sufficient demand. We had pencilled in October as the probable launch window, as it coincides with the start of the seasonal rush. We all know that quality books make the very bestt Christmas gifts.
We realised Lying Beneath was a great book – that’s why we published it, of course. But it was Hickathrift’s first-ever novel, and we reckoned it might be a slow burner that would need a few good, honest reviews on Amazon before it really took off.
Instead, we were pleasantly surprised by the instant success of this brilliant thriller. After all, the book hasn’t even been officially launched yet! The official launch and PR campaign is being organised by that legendary Northampton journalist, Ruth Supple. After all, Lying Beneath is set in and around Northampton, as well as London and Italy. In fact, it looks as though Lying Beneath might even put Northampton on the map – one reader has already told us she is planning a personal literary tour of the town to check out the places she read about in the novel. We kid you not.
Lying Beneath is a big, chunky read. Inside the hardback’s tasteful cover are over 450 pages of unputdownable twists and turns.
The plot . . .
When Emma Harding arrives at a new museum in Northampton to investigate the legal status of a newly discovered Canaletto worth forty million pounds, she expects a straightforward covenant review. What she finds is rather more complicated.
The painting depicts a valley in central Italy where her mother, archaeologist Susan Harding, worked one summer in 1994 — and never talked about properly again. The museum’s director, Jacob Ellery, was there too. Something happened that summer. Susan spent thirty years not quite saying what it was.
Moving between present-day Bloomsbury, Northampton and the heat of an Italian excavation thirty years ago, Lying Beneath is a novel about what gets buried and what endures. About the distance between the official record and the truth underneath it. About a daughter who discovers that the most important case of her career is also the one her mother never got to finish.
Part literary thriller, part excavation of memory and culpability, Lying Beneath asks what we owe to the past — and what happens when someone finally decides to go looking.
Lying Beneath is the first novel in the Emma Harding trilogy.
You’re going to love it – and like all books from the Hickathrift Press, it’s available on Amazon now.
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