โ Scribed by Cornwell, Bernard
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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 โ 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...
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
In the cobbled streets outside Newgate Prison, the common and desperate of London gather regularly to enjoy the spectacle of human necks broken at the end of a hangman's rope. For Rider Sandman, newly returned from the Napoleonic Wars, it is not grim entertainment that draws him here, but a mission
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 โ but then the hangman had never hung a guilty man, he said. But even in 1820, the Home Secretary could occasionally us