Slapton Sands - Tapa dura

It's 1976 and American student Alice Bourne is studying history at Kent University. The chosen subject for her doctoral thesis is an event which took place 32 years earlier at Slapton Sands, a beach on the south Devon coast used by the Americans during WW2 to prepare for the Normandy landings. The rehearsal went disastrously wrong and 1500 marines lost their lives - but the truth about exactly what happened on that fateful day in April 1944 has never been discovered. Herself a stranger in a strange land, only just becoming used to the English and their peculiar ways, Alice is determined to find out more about these farm boys from Iowa and Nebraska who came to an alien land prepared to fight Nazism, determined that the true story of their sacrifice should finally be told. But someone is making Alice feel increasingly unwelcome. Minor disturbing incidents escalate until Alice believes she's being haunted: targeted by a malevolent individual with his own dark reasons for preventing her from finding out what really happened at Slapton Sands. A fascinating historical novel, a poignant love story and a chilling ghost story, SLAPTON SANDS will keep readers enthralled.

Francis Cottam was born in Southport, Merseyside, in 1957. A full-time journalist, he has lived and worked in London for the past twenty years. His first novel, THE FIRE FIGHTER, was published in 2001.