Review:- Martin EDWARDS – “The Coffin Trail”

Year Published: - 2004
Where the book was from:- Pensby Library
ISBN: - 0 7490 8320 4
Pages: - 293pp
Genre: - Crime
Location:- A fictional valley in the Lake District
How I came across it: - Reviewed on a blog
Rating: - ***** ****
One sentence summary:- A good modern day crime novel set in a fictional but credible valley among my childhood haunts.

Describe the plot without giving anything away:- Daniel Kind, an Oxford historian and Miranda, a London journalist, decide to get away from their pasts and set up home together in the Lake District. They buy a cottage in which a murderer is said to have lived but he died before he could be arrested and tried. Daniel knew the man as a youngster and finds it difficult to believe he could have been a killer. He stirs up a hornet’s nest just as a new crime unit is set up under DCI Hannah Scarlett to review cold cases.

General comments:- A most readable story with the added attraction for me of using a Lake District background. Martin has since added two more stories to this series ands a fourth book is due this year.
Lake District Mysteries
1. The Coffin Trail (2004)
2. The Cipher Garden (2005)
3. The Arsenic Labyrinth (2007)
4. The Serpent Pool (2010)

Quotations:
“Thoreau opted out of corporate America a century and a half ago and made his home in a log cabin in the backwoods of Massachusetts.”
“A role model, then?”
“Not exactly. He only stuck it for a couple of years.”
“And after that?”
“Back to the city. The simple life wasn’t quite as simple as he hoped.”
“What happened?”
“He tried to cook a fish for supper and ended up burning down three hundred acres of woodland. Some people called him the Sage of Walden. To the locals, he was the fool who set fire to the forest.”

A blackboard outside bore the legend: I wandered lonely as a cloud and then I thought – sod it, I fancy a pint.

Martin Edwards was born at Knutsford, Cheshire in 1955 and educated in Northwich and at Balliol College, Oxford University, taking a first class honours degree in law. He trained as a solicitor in Leeds and moved to Liverpool on qualifying in 1980. He published his first legal article at the age of 25 and his first book, about legal aspects of buying a business computer at 27. He became a partner in the local law firm of Mace and Jones in 1984. He is married with with two children and lives in Lymm. Martin is a member of the Murder Squad collective of crime writers and is chairman of the nominations sub-committee for the CWA Diamond Dagger (crime writing's most prestigious award). In 2007 he was appointed the Archivist of the Crime Writers Association. He is the author of a series of crime novels featuring Harry Devlin. I’m pleased to say he has commented on my book blog in the past without – and this is the important bit – attempting to blow his own trumpet in the process.