The Black Country
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3.9 • 12 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times Book Review said of The Yard, “If Charles Dickens isn’t somewhere clapping his hands…Wilkie Collins surely is.” Now Alex Grecian returns with his second novel of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad—and it’s a gripper.
The British Midlands. Inhabitants call it the “Black Country”—and with good reason. Bad things happen there.
When three members of a prominent family disappear from the Midlands—and a human eyeball is discovered in a bird’s nest—Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad is called in. But Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith have stepped into something much more bizarre and complicated than expected.
Superstitions abound in the intertwined histories of the villagers, including a local legend about a monster some claim to have seen. In addition, a mysterious epidemic is killing off the inhabitants, and the village itself is sinking into the coal mines below. Day and Hammersmith soon realize that they, too, are in over their heads. And the more they investigate, the more they fear that they may never be allowed to leave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1890, Grecian's startling and spooky sequel to The Yard (2012) charts the efforts of Scotland Yard's Murder Squad to locate a missing married couple and their toddler in Britain's industrial Midlands. In the village of Blackhampton, Insp. Walter Day and his team discover more than one mystery: a girl finds an eyeball under a tree, scores of townspeople are stricken with an unexplained plague, and a hideous figure is lurking in the woods with a gun. Battling local terror and superstition, the squad must also contend with the town's physical collapse into the mines beneath it. Grecian's bold melding of horror with historical elements more than compensates for the dramatic overkill at the end. The novel's varied relationships balance pathos with humor and point up lessons on human responsibility on what we owe to those with whom we're connected. The nascent bond between Day and Sgt. Nevil Hammersmith is especially appealing, hinting at many rich developments to come.
