Valerie Laws
About Valerie Laws | Extract from The Rotting Spot
When student Lucy Seaton goes missing, her friend Erica Bruce is convinced there's a link to the disappearance of Lucy's cousin years before. At first, Inspector Will Bennett is sceptical of Erica, with her homeopathy and love of William Blake's prophecies; so she begins her own investigation, contending with Lucy's steely mother and religious aunt - and the doubtful assistance of excess-loving 'charva' Stacey. On the sea-lashed Northumbrian headland of Stony Point, the skull hunter's rotting spot hides a secret, while the families round about hide several more. Someone's getting away with murder... and they'll do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
"A darkly intriguing debut."
Val McDermid
"Valerie Laws is a fresh and talented new voice in crime-writing. The Rotting Spot takes the established form of the rural detective novel, but brings it bang up to date. Here we have practitioners of complementary medicine and a binge-drinking pregnant young Geordie; we consider the relationship between women and food and the delights of skull collecting. And all within the framework of a well-structured plot."
Ann Cleeves
ISBN 978-1-906700-10-2
£6.99 plus £1.99 postage and packing.
or send a cheque for £8.98 and payable to Red Squirrel Press to
Red Squirrel Press, PO Box 219, Morpeth, Northumberland NE61 9AU,
with your name and address and saying you want a copy of The Rotting Spot.
"Meanwhile, Valerie Laws's crime fiction debut The Rotting Spot (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99) introduces Erica Bruce: recovering anorexic, practising homeopath and all-round canny Geordie lass. Erica also collects puffin skulls, but it turns out that there are a few of the human kind around as well... The book opens with a bang - a Saturday-night birth in the middle of a Newcastle street with new mother Stacey swearing like a sailor - and interweaves a suspenseful story with graphic extracts from 'The Skull Hunter's Blog' that speak of slime, maggots and decay. As Erica crosses paths with Detective Inspector Will Bennett - he of the blue, blue eyes - and skeletons rattle loudly in closets, Laws brings her locations vibrantly to life, allowing you to relish the refreshing North Sea breeze even as it whips her more dastardly characters into a murderous frenzy."
Valerie Laws (web site) is Writer in Residence at a London Pathology Museum, part of her Wellcome Trust Arts Award funded project (with artist Susan Aldworth) working with scientists on the process of dying. She's a poet, performer, playwright for stage and BBC radio, and sci-art specialist: her Arts Council-funded Quantum Sheep infamously involved spray-painting poetry onto live sheep.
She lives on the North East coast and has published seven books, including two poetry collections from Peterloo Poets. This is her first crime novel, written with mentoring by Lisanne Radice, resulting from a New Writing North 'Northern Writer's Award'. Ann Cleeves gave further editorial advice.
Extract
PROLOGUE
From the Skull Hunter's blog:
It's not easy cutting off a head: sliding the blade between the cervical vertebrae, sly and slick as a credit card springing a lock. It might be a fresh kill, plump and juicy, the sinews stretchy and strong. Or it might be an old, seasoned corpse...
From CHAPTER ONE
Stacey found herself lying on her back among the cold chips and bodily fluids already deposited there. A shape loomed, blotting out what little light penetrated. Stacey had a flash in her mind's eye of a tiny face, and a quick stab of loss, before consciousness left her, and she lay, her enormous belly offering itself to the night.
Nearby, Erica Bruce pushed back her sweat-damp hair. Vodka pounded in her veins. Her mate Hannah was snogging some loser, with teeth more ruined than the Roman Wall. She'd yelled into Hannah's ear, the one without a tongue in it, that she was going home. One of those sudden shifts in perception had taken place, when the seductive decadence of night life abruptly switched to squalor before her eyes, and she wanted out. Unsteady in her high heels, just another girl with a very short dress and lots of bare flesh on show, with straightened hair and alcohol-heavy eyes, Erica set off to secure a cab. The trance music she loved had stopped, and over the muffled pounding of the sea below the promenade, she heard a groan. Peering down the alley, she saw, two figures was it? A glimmer of white clothing showed the vague outline of someone on the ground, another darker shape busy about the inert form. Another groan.
Erica walked carefully into the alley, the stench of vomit making her grit her teeth as her best shoes squished through discarded take-aways.
Photo © David Hirst