Love on the rocks

When Lisa Jones and her boyfriend George take on the run-down Rocks Hotel, they aim to do for Mariscombe what Rick Stein did for Padstow (even though neither of them is quite sure what to do with a red mullet) and set up a chic maritime retreat. But renovating a hotel is about more than stripped wooden floors and Egyptian cotton sheets, particularly when the locals are shifty and unhelpful. Especially Bruno Thorne, the tall, dark and surly owner of the nearby Mariscombe Hotel, where life is one long holiday - for the staff, anyway. Amid the sandscastles and surf, passions run high as ghosts of the past come out of the freshly painted woodwork. A little midsummer madness leaves Mariscombe's inhabitants floating on a tide of infatuation, sending some of them rather too close to the rocks.