Mazzeri

‘He had heard the spirits calling his name from the maquis and he had heard their footfalls as they passed by his window in the night. The spirits had summoned him. He could not deny them..’

It is the last summer of the twentieth century in Calvi, northern Corsica, and an old man sits watching the kites fly. The festival of the wind is a lively and colourful celebration, but the old man’s heart is heavy, he has heard the Mazzeri whisper his name. He accepts that people prefer to believe the dream hunters belong to the past and yet he knows only too well that at night they still roam the maquis in search of the faces of those whose time has come.

Ten years later in the high citadel of Bonifacio, in the southern tip of the island, Richard Ross, armed with only the faded photograph of a Legionnaire standing beneath a stone gateway, finds the locals curiously unwilling to help him uncover his family’s roots. He rents a villa on the coast and meets the singularly beautiful Manou Pietri, who enchants him with tales of the megalithic isle, its folklore and the Mazzeri – the dream hunters.

For a while Ric’s life beneath the Corsican sun is as close to perfect as he could wish. Then a chance encounter with a feral boy turns Ric’s life upside down, and he is drawn deep into a tangled web of lies and deceit. On an island where truth and legend meet, where murder is commonplace and most crimes go unsolved, only the Mazzeri know who will live…

‘Mazzeri is written from my own experiences of Corsica,’ says Peter. ‘As a teenager I was caught up in the middle of a fire fight between feuding families, and later the matriarch of our village presented me with her notebook in which she had recorded local proverbs and aphorisms – the atmosphere they provoke is captured in Mazzeri.’

Peter Crawley was educated at Cranleigh School and the Goethe Institut. He is a transatlantic yachtsman, a historic motor racing driver and skier and now lives in Chertsey with his wife and three daughters.