PearlyBooks

12 in stock

The setting for the second Cragg and Fidelis mystery is again Georgian Preston, with the time moving forward a year to 1741.

When the pair are called to the drowning of the landlord of the Ferry Inn, whose corpse has turned up entangled in the River Ribble's salmon traps, a complex investigation begins in which love, greed and politics all take a hand. A national general election campaign is on, with Preston's two parliamentary seats being contested, and the town in a ferment of political debate punctuated by sporadic violence. The outbreak of deadly sickness that strikes a week before voting looks like a natural epidemic, but Dr Fidelis is convinced it is man-made and the possibility opens up that someone is trying to disrupt the vote. Is the mysterious political agent Denis Destercore part of the plot? And what of the role played by the town's rat-catcher, and his beautiful grand-daughter Maggie, as she wins an election of her own as Preston's May Queen?

As the investigation proceeds Fidelis is led to conduct a strange forensic experiment, while Cragg seeks inspiration in his library, from writers as varied as Chaucer, Aesop and Izaak Walton.

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