A Handful of Coins.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

This story of smuggling, murder, teenage angst, and family values on a “rugged seacoast” in 1927 England could just as easily have been set in Cape Breton in 2009, or on the West Coast of Vancouver Island in 1960. Robert Caverhill Jones, a retired Quebec educator, makes no effort at verisimilitude in his first novel. There is nary a hint here of England between the wars. Speech patterns, vocabulary, and dialect do nothing to identify time nor place. Phrases such as “in less time than one could say Jack Robinson” or “let’s stop horsing around” seem especially out of place. There is also, unfortunately, a bit of racial stereotyping, as an elderly Jew is the only character who seeks payment for performing a good service.

These negatives aside, however, Jones has fashioned a story which should hold the interest of young adult readers. A Handful of Coins is cut from the same cloth as the Hardy boys, with a plot full of youthful energy and danger, teenage intelligence, and hot blood. There is even a bit of sexual tension thrown in for good measure. Tommy Barraclough is the 16-year-old son of a poor fisherman in Crayford Village. When he accidentally finds himself in possession of a package belonging to Fetters, a well-known local smuggler (we are never really told what it is that he is smuggling), Tom is forced to resort to drastic measures to escape, measures that include feigning his own death. He is befriended by a group of circus performers who serve as surrogate family. Assisted by the Cobbler clan, Tommy is able to overcome the villains and look forward to a happy future.

Shoreline is a local Quebec publisher dedicated, according to Judith Isherwood, the owner, to making the “best books possible for first-time authors of quality work.” For this they are to be commended. A Handful of Coins, for all its inconsistencies, is a worthwhile effort.