When the best-selling Welsh writer Stead Jones died suddenly in his sleep 30 years ago, it left his wife and young daughters devastated.
At the time his various notes and unfinished manuscripts were squirrelled away in wooden chest for safekeeping, not to be looked at for decades.
But, after happening across the chest during a renovation of her parents' former house, now her family home, the author's youngest daughter Mari Stead Jones felt inspired to revisit his work.
After a long and emotional process, the result is her first novel Say Goodbye To The Boys, which is published by Parthian Books on 14 March.
The novel is a dark thriller set in a fictional 1940s Welsh seaside town, the inspiration for which is surely Pwllheli, where Stead Jones grew up and Mari herself holidayed as a child.
The characters and storyline are all her father's, but Mari believes her own embellishments add a bit of a modern flavour to the work.
The cover of Mari Stead Jones' novel Say Goodbye To The Boys
She told me the experience had been "truly cathartic" and enabled her to reconnect with the father she had been missing deeply for so many years.
"It was very emotional - I finished the last chapter and sat at my computer for half a day just crying.
"The story does have a sad ending but for me it felt like I was saying goodbye to my father all over again. It was a wonderful experience as I was only 18 when he died so this felt like I was getting to know him one adult to another.
"He never spoke about his writing, even though he was off in his study each night doing it, so this felt like I was gaining access to a whole new part of his personality."
Say Goodbye To The Boys would have been Stead Jones' fourth novel if he were still alive.
As Mari describes it: "It is his bones but I put the meat on it. The whole story was there from the very beginning but I changed some of the nuances and the language.
"My father was a very wordy writer and I'm not and I did feel a need to modernise some things so it was more attainable for readers my age."
It was coincidence that caused Mari to bring the book to publication, after Dai Smith at the National Library of Wales contacted her saying he wanted to re-publish her father's first novel, Make Room For The Jester, a Welsh take on The Catcher In The Rye.
"I mentioned what I was doing and he put me in touch with the publishers and it went from there.”
Author Mari Stead Jones
Mari, who lives in Lancashire, says Wales has always felt like home to her, as they would spend each holiday as a family in a static caravan back in Pwllheli and still have lots of family there.
Mari is now reviving one of her father's other manuscripts, this time set in the early 1920s. It is called The Road To Liverpool and the story travels all along the coastline from Swansea, through north Wales to Liverpool.
As with her first novel, Mari's mother was the first person she read it to.
"She was the one who suggested I start writing and look to Dad's chest for inspiration. She really likes what I've been doing which is wonderful."
Say Goodbye To The Boys is a darkly funny thriller and focuses on the summer adventures of three young friends, Philip, Emlyn and Mash, as they return home to Maelgwyn, their sleepy hometown.
They are planning on restoring an old boat and sailing off in search of fun until a young woman is found brutally strangled and the town soon realises there is a serial killer among them.
Mari added: "For me writing this book was like being with someone again, who you have missed so terribly that your heart felt it would never recover and all of a sudden your heart feels full and sound and whole again."
