HICKATHRIFT author Mark Coady’s novel Lying Beneath has won praise from celebrated English author Graham Hurley, who described it as “an absolute tour de force, a reminder of what can still be in the right hands: ambitious, meticulously researched, intimately observed, artfully plotted, and always refusing to follow Route One to bestsellerdom.”
The handwritten review from the well-known novelist delighted Mark, who said: “Graham Hurley inspired me over the years.”
Lying Beneath is the first novel in the Emma Harding trilogy.
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.
- Bestselling author Graham Hurley is best known for creating the character of DI Joe Faraday, following several standalone novels. He worked as a script-writer with Southern Television before becoming a researcher and later a director. For TVS, he filmed the discovery of the seabed wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck (with American oceanographer Robert Ballard) and produced ITV’s account of Richard Branson’s attempt to cross the Atlantic by balloon. Find out more at: https://www.grahamhurley.co.uk/
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