The Ash Cloud

Brian Connell was a photographer with a short attention span where wives were concerned; he went through three of them in five years. But that didn't mean he was guilty of murder, and it didn't stop him from dashing off to photograph an erupting volcano, accompanied by writer turned detective Jessica Hughes. Her job is not only to report on the eruption, but to keep Brian out of the clutches of the law until she and partner Philip Burgess can track down a killer who is as hard to pin down as a cloud of volcanic ash.The Ash Cloud is the second novel in the China Cove Mystery series. Cynthia E. Hurst is the author of two mystery series set in present-day Seattle, the R&P Labs Mysteries and the Zukie Merlino Mysteries, and the Silver and Simm and Milestone agency series, which both take place in Victorian England.

Like her characters, Cynthia grew up in Seattle, then earned a degree in journalism and worked on several newspapers and magazines in the US and UK. The R&P books are based on her time spent in the small research lab where her parents both worked, and many of the R&P staff's projects are ones actually undertaken by the lab. The Zukie books were inspired by her Italian relatives. She now lives in Oxfordshire, the setting for the two Victorian series. She is also the author of the Time Traveller trilogy, which visits various bits of English history, and which stemmed from an unfortunate incident.