CRUST: The best meal on Earth

by lyndon mallet

identified as a naturally occurring dew-like deposit that makes any kind of soil nutritious, offering a freely available solution to world hunger. If true, this would make it ‘the best meal on earth’. Theorists suggest it’s caused by interaction between recent changes in the atmospheric envelope and new terrestrial conditions. Farmers in various countries have known about it for some time and the knowledge has slipped into folklore. Industrial giant, Coyle International, grabs at the chance to corner the market by claiming the product was developed in its laboratories, and briefs a new advertising agency to promote it. Four graduates of an advertising course set up their own agency. Within a year, they are approached by the Coyle Corporation to pitch for CRUST. This is way out of their league and challenges their ethical limits. In accepting the account they sign non-disclosure agreements exposing them to personal risks they never anticipated. The story is told by Nick Carteret, one of the agency founders. Nick and the team dispute their client’s claim to have developed the product and find themselves out of their depth. They have privileged product information and their lives are at risk. One of the agency founders infiltrates Coyle and becomes the spokesperson for the CRUST enterprise. His partners think he has abandoned them, but he relents and plans to reveal Coyle’s fraud by taking the story to a major producer and selling the film rights. The partners’ hopes rest on the successful sale, gambling that public exposure of the CRUST fraud will protect them against retribution from Coyle.

173 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2021

About the author

Lyndon Mallet is a British novelist and cartoonist with film, TV and radio credits to his name. He started writing in his teens and became road manager of a flying circus in exchange for being taught to fly, before embarking on a career in advertising. His most well known literary creation is the Irish debt collector Mark Taffin. The first novel "Taffin" was published in 1980 and made into a movie starring Pierce Brosnan in 1988. He has written four Taffin novels. He was a staff writer on the famous British television crime drama The Bill from 1993 - 1998 and is credited for nine episodes.