Skin and Bone
A Mystery
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
It’s 1743, and the tanners of Preston are a pariah community, plying their unwholesome trade beside a stretch of riverside marsh where many Prestonians by ancient right graze their livestock. When the body of a newborn child is found in one of their tanning pits, Cragg’s inquiry falls foul of a cabal of merchants dead set on modernizing the town’s economy and regarding the despised tanners—and Cragg’s apparent championship of them—as obstacles to their plan. The murder of a baby is just the evidence they need to get rid of the tanners once and for all.
But the inquest into the baby’s death is disrupted when the inn where it is being held mysteriously burns down, and Cragg himself faces a charge of lewdness, jeopardizing his whole future as a coroner. But the fates have not finished playing with him just yet. The sudden and suspicious death of a very prominent person may just, with the help of Fidelis’s sharp forensic skills, bring about Cragg’s redemption...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Blake's richly imagined fourth 18th-century historical set in Preston, England (after 2015's The Hidden Man), a dead newborn turns up in a tanner's noxious "skin yard." Titus Cragg, the redoubtable coroner, won't cease trying to find out whether the baby was murdered and the identity of the parents even though it seems as if half the town is desperate to stop him. Assisted by the excitable physician Luke Fidelis, Cragg learns that the infant was indeed killed. But despite all obstacles including a truly terrifying (and suspicious) fire, mid-inquest Cragg also comes to believe that the place the corpse was found may be key to a cabal's plan to drive out the despised tanners and transform the town. The mystery's strengths are the author's skillful command of a large cast of characters, all of them nuanced and original, and his enterprising use of Georgian-era methods of investigating a homicide when examining a corpse was itself problematic and the powerful could legally demolish those who posed too many uncomfortable questions.
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