9781915523020
400 pp
PB 216 x 135 mm
Mono
£9.99/$17.99
Crime/Historical
World rights available
The 1840s. Railway Baron Sir Martin Malprelate has been laying waste to the warren of Camden; buying up houses and clearing streets for his new railway line linking King’s Cross with the prosperous town of Middlemarch. He stands to make his fortune ever more vast and to earn the loathing of all who attempt to stand up to him. Little wonder, then, that he meets a violent end on a foggy street after walking out of a particularly bitter meeting with outraged residents facing eviction. But the cause of his death causes more wonder. How could he have possibly fallen beneath the wheels of a speeding spectral train running on unbuilt tracks?Lacing it’s realism with both social commentary and the gothic imaginations of the time, this is a vivid recreation of a London stalked by poverty and haunted by visions of demons and ghosts; a world of slums, lavish wealth and opium dens. The narrative is coloured by exotic characters all too ready to believe in the supernatural but the plot is driven by rationality and the all too real motivations of greed and revenge.
ADAM ROBERTS is a Professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, London University. He is a leading authority on the works of Charles Dickens and has also published numerous books and academic studies on various other authors.