What a surprise to have an adventure mystery tale of secrets to review. So concealed are these secrets, that the whole scenario seems to be normal, even to the reader. Yet some of these secrets are kept hidden away until revelation day, when they suddenly surface with great ease.

Here is a read which gives one great pleasure. Maybe I am harking back to my younger days when adventure stories were commonplace, whether of the mystery or escape genre. Then, there were no mandatory love scenes, broken lives or divorces included in the story lines. Stories then gave facts that came straight out of the writer’s imagination. Despite the facts being ingenious, often obscure, the reader was required to stay alert to follow the clues being trailed by the writer.

And so it is that the main character in The Secret Resort of Nostalgia, a young man of 22, named Mike Denning, takes up a new post in Nostalgia, a small self-sustaining community. It seems Nostalgia is a night’s train journey to the Irish coast from Denning’s aristocratic employer’s stately home. Before setting out on the journey to Nostalgia, he meets his employer who is known as Earl, apparently the third generation of self-made landowners.

So, the story starts. Denning then finds himself travelling on the night train to his new post. He has supper in an old-fashioned Pullman dining car. Here we have shades of Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Lady Vanishes – Margaret Rutherford plays the part of Miss Froy, a British nanny kidnapped on the night train to a ‘wicked’ Eastern European country. Nostalgia, we learn, is built on an abandoned hippie commune by the sea. There are no cars. The community has its own currency and trading is self-sufficient.

The first line of the book begins with two simple sentences ‘I saw everything. I saw nothing.’ That should have been a clue to this reviewer. But it was not. So, we follow the narrator to his new life on Nostalgia. Conveniently for the author, Denning has the good fortune to fall in love right at the start of the novel with his employer’s ‘gorgeous’ secretary. She has a pretty name of Saoirse which is actually unpronounceable, unless you know the Gaelic language (according to wikiHow, Saoirse is pronounced Seer-sha, meaning ‘Freedom’!)

Nostalgia seems to be an idyllic community which is safe and prosperous. Strangely, the inhabitants who live in Nostalgia have no relatives or living families outside the community. It is the criteria by which they qualify to be there. Yet, the clues are falling fast for Denning, even though he is unable to decipher them. There appear to be mysteries although no way of breaking in with demystifying answers. Yet by the end of the novel, all is unravelled not by this reader but by the author through his hero, who of course gets the girl. The narrative is well written and would make a good holiday read. The author very firmly controls the story line making it almost impossible to break the mystery.

The Secret Resort of Nostalgia is one of three novels written by Sahlan Diver. There are two facts that are surprising about the fate of this book. It is well crafted, yet the author seems to have had to self-publish or use simple first author publishing devices to get reviews. So, why has his work been ignored by the traditional publishing folk especially as it has the makings of an excellent film script? BIG MISTAKE Harper Collins, Bloomsbury Books and friends!

Katharine