BLOG TOUR

About the author

Emma Burstall was a newspaper journalist in Devon and Cornwall before becoming a full time author. Tremarnock, the first novel in her series set in a delightful Cornish village, was published in 2015 and became a top-10 bestseller.

Follow Emma

Twitter: @EmmaBurstall

Facebook: @emmaburstallauthor

About the book

Be careful what you kiss for...

Esme Posorsky is an enigma. For as long as people can remember, she has been part of community life in the quaint Cornish fishing village of Tremarnock, but does anyone really know her? She is usually to be found working in her pottery studio or at home with her beloved cat, Rasputin. But when an old school friend turns up with a secret from the past, nothing will ever be the same again.

Meanwhile teenager, Rosie, is excited to find a bottle washed up on Tremarnock beach with a message from a former German prisoner of war. While the rest of the village is up in arms about a new housing development, she sets out to find him. Little does she know, however, that her discovery will unleash a shocking chain of events that threatens to blow her family apart. Tremarnock may look like a cosy backwater, but some of its residents are about to come face-to-face with tough decisions and cold reality…

Buy links:

Amazon: mybook.to/ACornishSecret

Kobo: http://bit.ly/2L3ISWI

iBooks: https://apple.co/2M5a1cy

Google Play: http://bit.ly/2JxvYSX

Follow Aria

Website: www.ariafiction.com

Twitter: @aria_fiction

Facebook: @ariafiction

Instagram: @ariafiction

Follow Head of Zeus

Website: http://headofzeus.com/

Twitter: @HoZ_Books

Facebook: @HeadofZeus

Instagram: @headofzeus

EXTRACT

Across the English Channel, in the little seaside village of Tremarnock in south-east Cornwall, Esme Posorsky was pacing around her upstairs flat, checking again that the white shutters were properly closed, electrical sockets turned off and appliances unplugged. She wasn’t normally as conscientious, but she’d already dressed, washed, had two cups of tea and zipped up her suitcase. The pot plants had been watered; Rasputin, her fluffy marmalade cat, had been fed and she’d arranged for her friend and neighbour, Liz, to feed him in her absence.

She’d locked up her pottery studio in the neighbouring village and didn’t need to go there again. The washing, normally hanging on a wooden airer by the bedroom radiator, had been put away, and there were no stray cups or plates on the draining board. She really couldn’t think of anything else, and there was still an hour before she’d need to leave for the railway station. Why did time go so slowly when you wanted it to fly?

She decided that she’d be better off taking a walk than sitting around here twiddling her thumbs, and found herself wishing that she could call on Tabitha. The young woman had only recently moved out of the downstairs flat with her small son, Oscar, and Esme missed them. They hadn’t gone far, but Dove Cottage felt a bit lonely now: quieter and colder, because the heat no longer rose up through the floorboards of the old fisherman’s cottage. Her gas and electricity bills would rocket this winter, for sure.

She slipped on her green Birkenstock sandals and checked herself in the small oval wall mirror by the door. Like most of the items in the flat, it was an antique of sorts; not worth much but pleasing to look at, with its gilt frame and bevelled edges. It dated back to the thirties and had been left to her by her Polish grandmother, along with various bits of jewellery. Esme tended to the view, like her hero, William Morris, that you should have nothing in the house that you did not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. To this, though, she would add ‘or dear to your heart’, because she could be tremendously sentimental.

A strand of her salt-and-pepper hair had escaped from its bun and she fastened it with a hairgrip as she gazed at her reflection: the thin face, pale skin, broad, high forehead, probing little grey eyes and sharp nose. She wasn’t vain, because she’d never considered herself beautiful. Down the years she’d heard herself described as ‘strong-boned’, ‘handsome’ and ‘unusual’, which she’d chosen to take as compliments; but she’d never heard anyone call her pretty.

In any case, she liked to think that what she lacked in beauty, she more than made up for in style. She loved colour, and as an art student in London in the seventies, she’d cultivated an eccentric, bohemian air with long, flowing cheesecloth skirts, droopy ethnic tops – usually picked up in flea markets – and outlandish jewellery. It was an image that she’d stuck with because she knew it suited her, and even now, at sixty-one, it gave her some satisfaction to know that she still stood out in a crowd.

That said, today she felt unusually dowdy. The khaki walking trousers, bought just recently, were an odd shape, and her faded, navy cotton top had cat hairs on it. She picked them off, one by one, and checked the clasps at the back of her turquoise stud earrings. She’d have to do.

She was about to switch off the overhead light and grab her bag from the small table beneath the mirror when she heard footsteps clattering up the fire escape that led to her front door. Grateful for the distraction, she hurried to open up and was pleased to find Liz on the step, clutching the hand of her small daughter, Lowenna.

If Esme hadn’t known them so well she might have laughed, because the pair were like identical versions of each other in different sizes. Both slightly built, they had straight dark hair tied back in ponytails, pale skin and big, round chocolate-brown eyes that gazed at you from beneath heavy fringes. The main dissimilarity on this particular morning, apart from their heights, was that Liz had a beautiful smile while Lowenna’s round face was scrunched up tight, her bottom lip sticking out.

Esme didn’t know much about the ways of children and might have ignored the little girl’s sulky expression, but Lowenna broke away from her mother and raced past both women into the darkened front room, where she threw herself on her tummy, drummed her small feet on the floorboards and proceeded to shriek.

‘What’s the matter?’ Esme asked, tipping her head to one side and staring at the child as though at a strange creature in a zoo.

‘Little Ducklings,’ Liz replied grimly. ‘She screamed blue murder all the way through.’

‘Oh dear.’

Esme had heard about Lowenna’s swimming lessons, which were supposed to cure her fear of water but didn’t seem to be working too well. The little girl, now two years old, had had a phobia ever since a near-fatal accident the previous September, when Liz’s friend Bramble had taken her into the sea to paddle and they’d been caught in a rip tide. Luckily, Bramble’s fiancé Matt had arrived just in time to prevent a tragedy.

‘Would she like a biscuit?’ Esme asked, slightly desperate because the screeching was hurting her ears.

When Liz said yes, the noise stopped, as if by magic.

Lowenna followed Esme to the kitchen and watched her rootle in the biscuit tin. Then, with a chocolate chip cookie in one hand and some wooden salad servers to play with in the other, the child sat happily in front of the fireplace on a rug decorated with strutting peacocks.

Esme opened the shutters again and bright sunlight flooded the room, illuminating the peacocks’ vivid blue and green feathers, the jewel-like colour of the cushions on the sofa and the shimmering gold Buddha on the shelf above the TV. Just behind it was a statue of the Virgin Mary in a white gown and royal blue cape, her hands clasped in prayer. Having been brought up a Catholic, Esme still went to Mass once a week, but she’d be the first to admit that these days it was more out of habit than anything else. She was interested in world religions and had studied them a bit; in truth, she found the Buddhist philosophy more palatable, though she’d never seriously considered converting.

‘I hope I’m not delaying you?’ Liz asked, taking a seat beside her friend on the pinkish-purple sofa. ‘Rosie said she’d like to feed Rasputin. I just wanted to check that’s OK with you?’

Rosie was Liz’s fourteen-year-old daughter by her previous partner, Greg.

‘Of course,’ said Esme. She’d known the girl since she was small. She and her mother, stepfather and little sister now lived in the cottage several doors down, called Bag End.

Soon the women were nursing homemade lattes in vintage porcelain mugs decorated with English roses. The room was quiet for a moment, save for Lowenna’s contented mumblings, the odd screech of a seagull outside and the occasional rumbling of a car driving by.

Liz, who wore flip-flops, jeans and a simple white T-shirt, crossed one leg over another and asked Esme about her forthcoming walking trip. ‘You haven’t told me who you’re going with?’

‘Someone I was at school with,’ Esme replied, blowing on her drink before taking a sip. ‘Caroline. We boarded together at St Hilda’s in Canterbury. It was a convent school, run by nuns. She was a couple of years below me and I was her “buddy”, which meant it was my job to help her settle in. She only stayed a year and a half but we’ve kept in touch, though we haven’t actually seen each other in all that time. Her husband worked for an international aid agency and they’ve lived all over the world, most recently in Paris. He’s just retired. It’ll be quite strange to see her again.’

Liz’s eyes widened. ‘Goodness! You’ll have a lot to catch up on!’