‘A Deadly Summer’ by Claire Back

Published by Cranthorpe Milner Publishers,
30 June 2026.
ISBN: ‏978-1803783802 (PB)

A Deadly Summer is an impressively assured debut by Claire Back, a longtime book club member and professed crime fiction and TV drama fan who recently was moved to try to write a murder mystery of her own. The result is a resounding success. Set in the author’s beloved Wales, it incorporates locations in Pembrokeshire where the author was born and raised.    

The story has two interlinking timelines—1984 and 2015—with Back impressively conveying the unique atmosphere and customs characterising these two periods. The novel begins with a brief prologue in the mid-eighties describing an unnamed man disposing of a corpse in a sinkhole on the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path and continues thirty years later—and only a short distance from the secret burial site—in the fictional seafront town of Penroth, where DS Nia Tremeyrick must identity a body found in an abandoned building and determine the manner of death. 

The High Cliff has fallen on hard times. Once the busiest and grandest of Penroth’s hotels, by 2015 it had been empty and derelict for decades. But recently it has come into the possession of a construction firm tasked with its renovation. The plan is to make it into expensive apartments. In clearing out the rubbish, workers find a corpse in the attic.    

Nia Tremeyrick is the typical flawed but endearing crime fiction protagonist. She feels unappreciated and undervalued by her colleagues in the police. Her ageing parents, struggling to survive in their isolated farm on the coast, rely heavily on Nia’s elder sister Jen, who resents all the responsibility for their care falling on her shoulders. Nia and her husband—who wanted children while she didn’t—are divorced. She hopes solving the case of the mysterious corpse will revive her career and bring her a measure of happiness. 

Back in the summer of 1984, we meet a different cast of characters who have links to the High Cliff Hotel. Cerys Pritchard is a bookish teenager who lives with her parents in the Victorian guesthouse they run in Penroth, one of twenty on its Promenade. Cerys does her best to help her parents with the backbreaking round of chores related to accommodating guests during the busy holiday season, when its eight double rooms are fully booked. All is going well until the cook, Mrs Bowen, must have a hip operation. She asks her niece to step in to help while she convalesces, having no idea of Kay Abbot’s true nature. The flirtatious and callous Kay encourages Cerys to join her in attending illicit parties at the derelict High Cliff Hotel, with tragic results.    

Early in the novel, preparing for her imminent departure for university, Cerys reads a Thomas Hardy novel, and The Deadly Summer can resemble that author in depicting the pitilessness of fate and how the best of intentions can result in the worst of outcomes. Back’s characters are convincingly drawn, the story’s plot is plausible, and the author expertly weaves together the past and present narratives in creating an unputdownable mystery. Back is sufficiently skilled to make us care about the cast of the story—and to regret the misfortunes that befall them—but her novel is a compelling and enjoyable read.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Claire Back was born and raised in Pembrokeshire. Claire has always felt a deep connection to this part of the Welsh coastline. After a successful career in finance, she retrained to work in Early Years education and is currently writing her second novel - another mystery set in wartime Wales. A keen walker and gardener, she lives with her husband and two spaniels in Wrexham

 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. The fourth and final book of this series will appear in spring 2026. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.