The author is an acknowledged expert on the Victorian era and he uses this expertise to great effect to create pacy, readable crime thrillers set in the late 19th century. With sinister Pan European plots, secret organizations and a brilliant central character, Detective Inspector Arnold Box, will have you burning the midnight oil, or missing your stop on the train – you have been warned. And the great news is that if you like the book there are plenty more in the series as this is the eighth.
In the chill winter of 1894, Dr Antoine Landru, a foreign idealist who runs a free clinic in the deprived London district of St Sepulchre's declares that the recent opening of an ancient plague pit in the area will lead to the return of the bubonic plague. The authorities laugh him to scorn, but when Sir Anthony Denny, Public Physician to the Home Office, dies of a mysterious illness, the authorities are forced to take notice. Public fear climaxes in a serious riot in St Sepulchre's, which is only quelled with the aid of the military. Detective Inspector Arnold Box of Scotland Yard becomes involved in the Landru affair, which proves to be only peripheral to an evil plot designed to bring Europe to the brink of war by the wholesale destruction of the reigning houses of Europe. Working with Colonel Kershaw, head of secret intelligence, Box pursues the mysterious and deadly Herr Falkenheyn, the ringleader of the plot, and the climax of the affair is reached in a snowbound country hotel in Yorkshire, where Box and his associates bring the whole conspiracy to a dramatic end. This is the eighth in the Inspector Box series of period thrillers.
Norman Russell is a full-time writer and academic, who has had fifteen novels published. He is an acknowledged authority on Victorian finance and its reflections in the literature of the period, and his book on the subject, The Novelist and Mammon, was published by Oxford University Press in 1986. He is a graduate of Oxford and London Universities. After military service in the West Indies, he became a teacher of English in a large Liverpool comprehensive school, where he stayed for twenty-six very enjoyable years, retiring early to take up writing as a second career.
