Scarlet Town

'A wonderful and compelling murder mystery' - LOUISE FEIN
'A brilliantly entertaining historical crime' - PHILIPPA EAST
'An elegant, richly detailed, historical joy' - KATE GRIFFIN

1796. A rigged election. A town at war. a murderer at large...

Disgraced 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 home town 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 patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. But it is no easy matter, thanks to the machinations of the rival political factions, not to mention the riotous performances of Toby the Sapient Hog.

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, and Blue Water, a Waterstones Thriller of the Month. Perfect for readers of Andrew Taylor, Laura Shepherd-Robinson and S.J. Parris.

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 Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of the Month. Her second, Blue Water, was published in 2022. Find her on Twitter @LeonoraNattrass