Book description
Not many men emerged from Trafalgar without an ounce of credit to
their names, but courtesy of an over-fondness for rum and his habitual
bad luck, Lieutenant Martin Jerrold managed it. In February 1806, he
is given one final chance to redeem his reputation and dispatched to Dover.
Things don't augur well when, walking off the effects of a night in
the tavern, Jerrold stumbles across a corpse lying on the beach. And
they take a distinct turn for the worst when, to his horror and
bemusement, he is suspected of murder. With a captain who despises
him, and the local magistrate determined to see him hang, he knows
clearing his name will require an imporbable reversal of his miserable
fortunes. Somewhere in Dover's twisted streets, someone must know
something. But Jerrold soon discovers that nothing is as it seems in a
town where smuggling is a way of life, where everyone from the
fishermen to the colonel of dragoons drinks only the finest French brandy...
Distrusted by his superiors, set upon by suspiciously well-informed
thugs and attacked by the French at sea, Jerrold does find some
sympathy in the less-than-respectable arms of the comely Isobel, but
he knows he has but two weeks to save his skin - or perish in the attempt.
Edwin Thomas grew up in West Germany, Belgium and America before
returning to England to study history at Lincoln College, Oxford. His
conclusion to the short story 'Death by the Invisible Hand' was
published in The Economist in 1997, and the first chapter of The
Blighted Cliffs was runner-up in the 2001 Crime Writers' Association
Début Dagger Award for new fiction. The first two installments of the
adventures of Martin Jerrold, The Blighted Cliffs and The Chains of
Albion, are available in Bantam paperback.
