The Castaway Hat is an amusing intrigue of lure and lucre, spanning two generations. A mystery of a straw hat with a faded red ribbon washed among the rocks. The finder, Edgar, by co-incidence, not that he knows it, met the owner the previous night at a book launch. Daphne and the hat were parted when a launch capsized – she swimming to an island off New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula, only to discover an old gold mining tunnel, a recently worked old mining tunnel. The author, Erica, locates the earlier, but not original diggers of that tunnel. An adventure that spans oceans and time to settle in the tiny carless town of Murren, Switzerland, during World War II.