Title: Paraffin Winter
Description: Paraffin Winter is set in the South Coast UK town of Poole in the long, cold winter of 1963.  This was  a time when the country was still struggling with the after effects of the war, a time of fried spam dinners, starting handles and paraffin oil stoves, a time when the population eyed each other suspiciously across the class divide.  Many young men had survived the war with high hopes and experience of killing: not a happy combination.  The enlightenment of the nineteen-sixties had not yet begun.

Struggling to keep their heads above the icy water, Ronnie and Jenny Delaney are getting by.  But then, when Ronnie allows himself to be dragged into investigating a murder, his past catches up with him and he soon finds that he’s out of his depth, in a mire of protected interests that stretch all the way up to the Government.   It's going to take someone cleverer than Ronnie to get to the bottom of this one. And that someone is closer than he could ever have imagined ...

Paraffin Winter is a book about a murder, and tracking down a killer.  But it’s also about Britain in the early 1960s, about relationships, about social class, and about how everything was about to change as the 1960s unfolded.  For Ronnie and Jenny, for the abandoned heroes of the second world war, for the whole of Britain, nothing would ever be the same again.
Places: Poole
People: Tom Driberg, Valerie Hobson
Time periods: 1963