George Bathurst

George Bathurst is the pen name of award-winning journalist Andrew Cooper, who scribbled for various weekly and daily newspapers in the UK and later Canada, where he has lived since 1986. He has now embarked on a new career as a writer of mystery novels set in the fictional industrial town of Worbury in the West Midlands, England.

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It was once headline news in Worbury: A teenage girl followed by a mysterious stranger called ‘the umbrella man’ disappeared on lonely Oak Lane Common one foggy November night.The story by rookie Worbury Echo reporter Charlie Hodge suggested Rose Brown was the victim of foul play. But Charlie got it wrong: Rose hadn’t come to any harm — she’d merely left her troubled life to start fresh elsewhere. She said as much in a subsequent phone call to a friend. Police called off the search and said no crime had been committed.Charlie immediately quit the weekly paper his family had owned for generations and left for London, where he became a big noise in the world of public relations.Now, fifteen years after writing the story that ended his journalism career, Charlie is reluctantly back in his hometown where he finds the Echo teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, a media dinosaur in the online age.He also discovers that Rose Brown never came back to Worbury, and no one ever saw or heard from her again. And there’s something else: The umbrella man is back, prowling the common and nearby allotments after dark.It all adds up to a story without an ending. And Charlie has a last chance to write one … before the Echo prints its final edition.

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