Scarlet Town

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** A TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR **

'Nattrass's best yet' - S.G. MACLEAN
'Wonderfully evocative' - DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Authentic and relentlessly pageturning' - SUNDAY EXPRESS

A rigged election. A feuding Cornish town. A suspicious death. And a perspicacious pig.

May 1796, and former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer, the journalist William Philpott, have escaped America - and Philpott's near imprisonment for libel - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's hometown of Helston, Cornwall, in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats.

Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's political patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands...

The new page-turning historical mystery from the author of Black Drop, a 2021 Times Book of the Year. Perfect for readers of Andrew Taylor and Laura Shepherd-Robinson.

Reviews

'Gloriously entertaining... Authentic and relentlessly pageturning, Scarlet Town provides fresh proof of its author's talent for setting a gripping murder mystery against a detailed backdrop of 18th-century society, and it further enhances her reputation as a first-class writer' - Sunday Express

'Wonderfully evocative' - Daily Telegraph

'Leonora Nattrass transports the reader to 18th-century Cornwall and corrupt electioneering in a divided town... Writing with panache, Nattrass reminds us that rotten boroughs are hardly a new phenomenon.' - Financial Times

'As enjoyable a read as her earlier novels' - Sunday Times

Author Bio

Leonora Nattrass studied eighteenth-century literature and politics, and spent ten years lecturing in English and publishing works on William Cobbett. She lives in Cornwall, in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts, and spins the fleeces of her Ryeland sheep into yarn. Her first novel, Black Drop, was published in 2021, and was a Times Book of the Year. Her second, Blue Water, was published in 2022 and was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award. Her fourth novel, standalone historical mystery The Bells of Westminster, will be published by Viper in 2024. Find her on X @LeonoraNattrass.