#BookExtract-‘In Two Minds’ by Alis Hawkins

About the book…

Harry Probert-Lloyd, a young barrister forced home from London by encroaching blindness, has begun work as the acting coroner of Teifi Valley with solicitor’s clerk John Davies as his assistant.
When a faceless body is found on an isolated beach, Harry must lead the inquest.

But his dogged pursuit of the truth begins to ruffle feathers. Especially when he decides to work alongside a local doctor with a dubious reputation and experimental theories considered radical and dangerous.

Refusing to accept easy answers might not only jeopardise Harry’s chance to be elected coroner permanently but could, it seems, implicate his own family in a crime.

Today I am thrilled to bring you an extract of the new Teifi Coroner novel, ‘‘In Two Minds’

My grateful thanks to The Dome Press for my gifted copies of both books which I absolutely have no hesitation in recommending.

HARRY

 I rode to Charles Schofield’s office through a clear January afternoon without wind or cloud, nothing overhead but a fading blue of frosty purity. The beauty of the day should have cheered me but, as I contended with a lingering fury with my father and a growing apprehension at the prospect of speaking to John’s employer, my spirits remained anything but cheery.

                In an attempt to master my mood, I turned my attention to the road ahead and tried to focus on what I could make out.

                You’ll find you become better at perceiving things you would not previously have noticed, my eye doctor had told me. You’ll learn how to make use of your remaining vision. And he was right; despite the fact that one’s peripheral vision is not designed to register detail, I was learning how to interpret the tantalising, sidelong view it offered. The problem was, I was not learning quickly enough. Much of my seeing now depended upon guesswork and familiarity anything new was difficult to make out until I was very close to it.

                I knew this road well but that did nothing to lift my mood. Everything around me – winter fields, hedges, ditches, leaf-bare trees, even the stretch of the cold brown Teifi away down the bank to my right – belonged to my father’s estate, an inheritance and a responsibility I had never wanted, but which blindness seemed to have made inevitable.

                Until today.

                The magistrates’ request that I become Acting Coroner for the Teifi Valley held out the possibility of a different future. Unpaid and ad hoc the office of coroner might be but, if I could secure it permanently, the job would offer independent occupation and a potential escape from the combined exigencies of filial duty and blindness. As coroner, I would no longer be a mere footman to the status quo, standing in wait behind my father, slipping – when the time came – into his warm space on the magistrates’ bench, a prospect that was about as appealing as contemplating my own annihilation.

                What cause does the injury find for the demise of this man?

                He was stifled to death by gentility.

No. Whatever objections my father might raise, I was not prepared to play the docile squireling. Not while an alternative presented itself.

But, if I was to prove myself a credible coroner, securing John Davies as my coroner’s officer was essential.

JOHN

When Harry walked into Mr Schofield’s office, I didn’t know whether to be glad or furious. At last! Where had he been?

                Christmas had come and gone. Then the New Year. Then most of January. What had happened to that new beginning he’d talked about when we’d been working together? That new start in Cardiganshire as a solicitor who needed the right kind of clerk?

                I’d thought he was better than that. Dangling a job in front of a man and then disappearing for weeks on end.

                Old Schofield stood up as Harry came in but, from the look on his face, I could tell he wished he hadn’t. Force of habit though, isn’t it, standing for the gentry? Mind you, Harry’s gentility was questionable these days. In Newcastle Emlyn, anyway. All that grubbing about after a dead dairymaid. Not to mention speaking Welsh like a farm boy instead of honking English up his nose like the rest of the local crachach.

                I stared at him. He was wearing one of those new Mackintosh coats that they advertised in the illustrated papers – do I have to say any more? About as smart as the seat of a navy’s trousers.

                Mr Schofield cleared his throat in a way he probably thought was meaningful – though God alone knows what the meaning was – and he and Harry did the ‘how’s the family and can you believe it’s eighteen fifty-one, where’s the time going?’ dance for a bit. Then – finally – Harry got round to what he’d come for.

                ‘I’m afraid it’s becoming an unfortunate habit of mine, Mr Schofield, to come and ask you to indulge me with the services of Mr Davies.”

                Indulge him? That didn’t sound as if he’d come to offer me a job.

About the author…

Alis Hawkins grew up on a dairy farm in Cardiganshire. After attending the local village primary school and Cardigan County Secondary school, she left West Wales to read English at Oxford.

Subsequently, she has has done various things with her life, including becoming a speech and language therapist, bringing up two sons, selling burgers, working with homeless people, and helping families to understand their autistic children.

And writing. Always. Nonfiction (autism related), plays (commissioned by heritage projects) and, of course, novels.
Alis’s first novel, ‘Testament’, was published in 2008 by Macmillan and was translated into several
languages. (It has recently been acquired for reissue, along with her medieval trilogy of psychological
thrillers by Sapere Books).
Her current historical crime series featuring blind investigator Harry Probert-Lloyd and his chippy
assistant, John Davies, is set in Cardiganshire in the period immediately after the Rebecca Riots. As a sideeffect of setting her series there, instead of making research trips to sunny climes like more foresighted writers, she just drives up the M4 to see her family.
Now living with her partner on the wrong side of the Welsh/English border (though she sneaks back over to work for the National Autistic Society in Monmouthshire) Alis speaks Welsh, collects rucksacks and can’t resist an interesting fact.

Links-https://alishawkins.co.uk/