I’ll find out soon enough. One fine day, when I take that slow boat to Ultima Thule; in springtime, when the golden light returns, and the thaw begins. I can see it so clearly. The sea is darker than a bluebottle’s eye; the timbers creak and groan; the sails tug and the rigging sings in the breeze. Off the starboard bow we see land, empty except for the crocuses and lichen and wild seabirds. A single polar bear emerges from the long winter hibernation with that puzzled look on his face, the one that says, ‘My, oh, my! That must have been some night I had last autumn.’ I turn and offer some smoked seal to the Inuit pilot and say, ‘Tell me, fellah, what’s the name of this beautiful place?’
And he says, ‘My people call this place Louie Knight Sound.’
Also available by Malcolm Pryce:
From Aberystwyth with Love
The latest instalment in the wickedly funny Aberystwyth series sees Louie Knight, Aberystwyth’s only private detective, swapping the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and trying to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by his own exceptional standards . . .
It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth: the bandstand melts, the Pier droops, and Sospan the ice-cream seller experiments with some dangerously avant-garde new flavours. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator’s uniform walks into Louie Knight’s office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal.
Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he hadn’t believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man’s story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. His life imperilled by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans – a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut’s sock.
ISBN: 9781408801024 / Paperback / £7.99
(Published May 2009)
I would like to thank my editor Mike and agent Rachel for all their help and friendship.
MALCOLM PRYCE was born in the UK and has spent much of his life working and travelling abroad. He has been, at various times, a BMW assembly-line worker, a hotel washer-up, a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas, an advertising copywriter and the world’s worst aluminium salesman. In 1998 he gave up his day job and booked a passage on a banana boat bound for South America in order to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. He spent the next seven years living in Bangkok, where he wrote three more novels in the series, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth and Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth. In 2007 he moved back to the UK and now lives in Oxford.
THE LOUIE KNIGHT SERIES:
Aberystwyth Mon Amour
Last Tango in Aberystwyth
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth
First published 2007
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
Copyright © 2007 by Malcolm Pryce
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgements
About the Author
The Louie Knight Series
Copyright