KOOKINAW LAKE
Ashley Pearce
RIGHTS AVAILABLE: Film/TV rights handled by the author
RIGHTS AVAILABLE: All other rights available and handled by the bks Agency
When the past comes calling it’s time to leave - if you can
Stephen King meets Raymond Chandler in the world of Twin Peaks
In the remote Alaskan town of Kookinaw lake, Stella Lawrence has vanished, all efforts to find her have failed.
A motley group of her friends desperately continue to search for her as paranoia grips the town together with a growing fear that some strange force is at play. A man who seems to know more than he should about Kookinaw Lake and its inhabitants arrives and the friends soon suspect he brings more than an old Ford pick-up and an enigmatic turn of phrase, he carries a bible and is himself haunted by some abominable past trauma.
Strange behaviour and memories of a long-past event that nobody in the town could possibly have remembered culminate in bizarre suicides and more disappearances. The strange visitor covertly removes the bodies and as he pronounces over their impromptu burials in old English religious verse he thinks back to the horrific event that set his destiny in motion - maybe this time he’ll triumph over the malignant evil that has now brought him to this forgotten and vulnerable outpost.
As the friends begin to realise the terrible truth about the dark secret the mysterious newcomer brings with him from four hundred years ago, they also realise they are in a fight for their lives and that they must take a chance on the stranger - is he the bringer of evil, or their only hope?
Ashley Pearce is TV and Film director and writer. He has directed high-end Prime Time shows such as Downton Abbey, Maigret with Rowan Atkinson, Broken and Accused with Sean Bean (who won an Emmy and a Bafta for those two performances), Crossing Lines with Donald Sutherland for Netflix, Marcella also for Netflix/ITV and the three-part ghost story, Remember Me, with Michael Palin for the BBC. Ashley has also directed several episodes of Poirot and an updated version of Bouquet of Barbed Wire amongst other things.
For Marcella season 3, Ashley established a writers’ room to oversee the scripts in terms of story lines and, in particular, Anna Friel’s central themes and character arc across the series. He has adapted for the screen a George Simenon novella and a novel, The Godmother, for Rosamund Pike.
Before becoming a TV and Film director, Ashley was a fine-artist with group and solo shows in London and nationally. He produced the illustrations for the ENO Production of Falstaff, book jacket illustrations for major publishers as well as covers for Island Records. Ashley is also a semi-professional flamenco guitarist. Kookinaw Lake is his first novel.
His website is Ashley-pearce.com