Writing a book blurb

Cinnamon Press asked me for a blurb for Cold Crash. I found marketing my own work really difficult, and I worked for ages on it. Jan Fortune, my editor, said they would add to it as needed.

When it arrived, they'd changed nearly everything. It was brilliant - and I think they had a needed distance that I simply lack to be able to write it.

Here's Cinnamon's version:

For archaeologist Maxine ‘Max’ Falkland, life in early-50s London is difficult enough as she tries to move on from the death of her brother, an RAF pilot shot down over Korea. But, when she meets John Knox things get more complicated — before they get outright dangerous.

Flying her light plane to Scotland, Max overhears whispered arguments in Russian coming from the next-door room and sees lights across the moors that appear to answer flashes from the sea. Add the mysterious malfunction of her plane and she has a lot to confide when she encounters the enigmatic Richard Ash, a local landowner and recluse. But when Knox unexpectedly reappears and a dive goes disastrously wrong, Max must act fast as she finds herself in the middle of a Soviet military plot.

And my version: 

In 1952, archaeologist Dr Maxine ‘Max’ Falkland comes out of mourning for her brother, an RAF pilot who was shot down over Korea. John Knox, an American she meets, teases her with unexpected knowledge: her car (1950 Aston Martin DB2), her plane (Beechcraft Bonanza) and her favourite whiskey (Oban) – before he reveals he knew her brother. His challenges provoke her into action and she plans a summer of fieldwork in Scotland with fellow archaeologist Victor Westfield and his wife Emma. Max flies to the Isle of Mull, but finds suspicious characters everywhere, from the pub’s landlady to the purportedly American couple next door speaking Russian in the middle of the night. When she surfaces from diving and finds John Knox on her boat, Max doesn’t know whom to trust or what to believe.