Come the Fear
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
With the discovery of a young woman’s charred and blackened body, Richard Nottingham tackles his most disturbing case yet
March, 1733. Fire rages through an empty house in a rundown area of Leeds, but the investigation takes a disturbing turn with the discovery of the charred remains of a young woman and her baby amidst the smouldering ruins. Was the fire deliberately started to conceal the woman’s murder?
Richard Nottingham’s enquiries into the victim’s identity will lead him from squalid alehouses, prostitutes’ haunts and thieves’ dens to the home of a wealthy wool merchant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1733 Leeds, Nickson's outstanding fourth mystery featuring constable Richard Nottingham (after 2012's The Constant Lovers) shows that linking the crime under investigation to a wider plot of broader significance isn't necessary to carry the reader along. In the ruins of a house gutted by fire, Nottingham makes a gruesome find the blistered husk of a woman's corpse, with her fetus ripped out and placed on her sliced-open belly. Identifying the victim proves a challenge, and Nottingham and his men have a hard time getting traction in an inquiry of no interest to anyone but themselves. Besides delivering an intriguing puzzle, Nickson does a fine job depicting Leeds's underclass ("A few thousand souls, so many of them pushed together in the cold, crowded spaces of the poor: faceless, anonymous folk, all working for the few who tasted luxury each day without thought").
