Trailer Park Tuesday: Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

Here's proof that a (moving) picture is worth more than a thousand words.  The video for Jenn Ashworth's new novel Cold Light goes right to the bleak, chilled heart of the book which is being compared to Tana French and Laura Lippman.  On the other hand, the publisher's marketing copy is as bland as yesterday's bowl of oatmeal: "A dark tale with a surreal edge, it follows two fourteen-year-old girls, best friends, as they confront the dangers of a predatory adult world, where truth is cruelly sacrificed in the name of innocence."  Tune in to the book trailer, however, and you'll be haunted by the sight of twenty-four-year-old Laura (aka Lola), fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee, staring at the camera with haunted eyes and telling us the story of her teenage years with best friend Chloe.  The girls had such bright hopes for the future--escaping from their small English town, going to work at a department store perfume counter, eating arctic roe every night and watching Leonardo DiCaprio movies.  "We'd spend all our money on skirts and beads and blue bottles of alcohol in nightclubs," she says.  "But Chloe never made it to the perfume counter.  Instead, she'll always be fourteen."  Enter Carl, a much older boy who--at least in the trailer--reeks of skeevy danger.  Without giving too much away, the video hints at something horrible that happens to the three of them that summer.  And that, more than any flak copy, makes me want to pick up the book and uncover the whole mystery behind Laura, Chloe and Carl.