Book description
1820s Britain: after the wars with France, when unemployment was high
and soldiers could be paid off, when the government was desperately
afraid of social unrest, any crime was drastically punished and
thousands were hung. But one could petition the King and an
investigation might ensue…
The man in the dark cell in Newgate Prison was due to hang in a week.
He had been found guilty of murdering the aristocrat whose portrait he
was painting. He claimed to be innocent - but then the hangman had never
hung a guilty man, he said. But even in 1820, the Home Secretary could
occasionally use his powers to grant mercy if his investigator found
cause and Rider Sandman, once of the First Foot Guards, is given the job.
Rider Sandman, a hero of Waterloo, has family debts to repay but when
his first steps in the investigations produce a sizeable bribe to look
the other way, this only arouses his smouldering anger over the
condition of England, a country which he and others in Wellington's army
had fought to preserve. Stepping between gentlemen's clubs and taverns,
talking to aristocrats, fashionable painters, their models, and their
mistresses, dodging professional cut-throats and deceptive swordsmen,
Sandman uncovers a conspiracy of silence, a group whose proudest boast
was that they would do anything for any one of them.
Sandman is a wonderful character, as yet undaunted by the sleazy
streets, dank jails or the looming scaffold, and uncorrupted by
politicians, sneering gentlemen or frightening bruisers, an investigator
in the making and a brilliant, but very different, hero for all Bernard
Cornwell fans. 'Bernard Cornwell is a literary miracle. Year after
year, hail, rain, snow, war and political upheavals fail to prevent him
from producing the most entertaining and readable historical novels of
his generation…Cornwell at his best is utterly compelling. And this is
Cornwell at his best.' Daily Mail
'Page for page, sentence for sentence, scene for heart-stopping scene
GALLOWS THIEF is the strongest historical novel I have read this year…he
tells a cracking yarn and fills it with vivid characters and writes
crisp dialogue and gets the period detail right..it is hard to stop
reading…it is masterly.' Sunday Telegraph Bernard Cornwell worked for
BBC TV for seven years, mostly as producer on the Nationwide programme,
before taking charge of the current Affairs department in Northern
Ireland. In 1978 he became editor of Thames Television's Thames at Six.
Married to an American, he now lives in the United States.
