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    Gallows Court
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    Gallows Court
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    Gallows Court
    Ebook410 pages6 hours

    Gallows Court

    By Martin Edwards

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Superb—a pitch-perfect blend of Golden Age charm and sinister modern suspense, with a main character to die for. This is the book Edwards was born to write."—Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

    The first Golden Age-style mystery in the Rachel Savernake series… How close can one person get to a cruel justice system before falling victim to it?

    London, 1930

    Sooty, sulphurous, and malign: no woman should be out on a night like this. A spate of violent deaths—the details too foul to print—has horrified the capital and the smog-bound streets are deserted. But Rachel Savernake—the enigmatic daughter of a notorious hanging judge—is no ordinary woman. To Scotland Yard's embarrassment, she solved the Chorus Girl Murder, and now she's on the trail of another killer.

    Jacob Flint, a young newspaperman temporarily manning The Clarion's crime desk, is looking for the scoop that will make his name. He's certain there is more to the Miss Savernake's amateur sleuthing than meets the eye. He's not the only one.

    Flint's pursuit of Rachel Savernake will draw him ever-deeper into a labyrinth of deception and corruption. Murder-by-murder, he'll be swept ever-closer to its dark heart—and to the gallows themselves.

    Dark, atmospheric, and hearkening back to the Golden Age mysteries, Gallows Court is:

    • Perfect for fans of Sherry Thomas and Sophie Hannah
    • For readers who enjoy British crime mysteries and historical fiction
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateSep 17, 2019
    ISBN9781492699293
    Unavailable
    Gallows Court
    Author

    Martin Edwards

    Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime novelist whose Lake District Mysteries have been optioned by ITV. Elected to the Detection Club in 2008, he became the first Archivist of the Club, and is also Archivist of the Crime Writers’ Association. Renowned as the leading expert on the history of Golden Age detective fiction, he won the Crimefest Mastermind Quiz three times, and possesses one of Britain’s finest collections of Golden Age novels.

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    Reviews for Gallows Court

    4/5

    43 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Would like to have liked it but ultimately stopped reading. Partly I blame the Audible audiobook ... the novel isn't nearly as easy to follow this way, and the narrator had a particular style of speaking that she employed for all the characters, making them sound (while gruffer, younger, more male, etc.) equally insinuating and somewhat seductively wheedling, it was rather offputting. Just read the dang thing and make the voices different, that's all I need. So it's possibly a better book than my experience of it. Eventually there were just too many characters to keep track of, and all of them middle-aged professional white men (save for a minor handful), and I gave up caring who was who's lawyer or banker or lawyer's son or baronet's son or detective's friend's wife' cousin etc.

      (Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
    • 4/5
      This was well-written, and apart from slightly too many characters to keep on top of, well-plotted (in an utterly unlikely sort of way).
    • 5/5
      At the centre of this novel are two characters: Jacob Flint, a young newspaperman working for The Clarion, a sensationalist daily; and Rachel Savernake, an incredibly wealthy amateur sleuth, the daughter of a judge renowned for his severe punishment and reputed to be mad at the end.We know there is some sort of mystery surrounding Rachel Savernake right from the beginning. We are told so in a journal entry written in 1919 by a Juliet Brentano recording the death of her parents. Subsequent diary entries crop up in the novel and we attempt to reconcile the Rachel Savernake she writes about with the one we meet through Jacob Flint.Jacob has come to head the Clarion's crime desk rather earlier than expected because his boss has been run down by a car and is not expected to live. Jacob is convinced that what happened was no accident and he attempts to work out what Mr Betts was investigating. Everything seems to lead to Rachel Savernake.This was a challenging read, and even at the end when I thought I had worked everything out, how wrong I was!Fantastic Fiction suggests this novel is the first in a series centred on Jacob Flint.
    • 3/5
      Martin Edwards is one of my favorite authors, so I was looking forward to this first-in-a-new-series with a great deal of anticipation. The setting of Gallows Court is pitch-perfect. The streets of London in the dark and the fog are suitably creepy, and Edwards describes a world in the grips of the Depression very well. In addition, if you like creepy houses on remote islands in the Irish Sea, you should love Gaunt Island.The story has intermittent chapters from a young girl's journal written in 1919 that give us some backstory on the mysterious Rachel Savernake, and those chapters really make a reader wonder what type of person she is. When another character says, "Rachel Savernake is the most dangerous woman in England," you feel as though you must agree.The young newspaperman, Jacob Flint, is a callow youth. He's really not been out in the cold cruel world long enough to knock some sense into him, so he's completely unprepared when people he interviews are killed and thugs jump out of dark alleys to rough him up. He does have a knack for investigative journalism and he certainly doesn't know when to quit, so he does have plenty of potential.Gallows Court is a mystery in which nothing and no one should be taken at face value. Little is as it appears to be, and this is exactly the sort of mystery that can be so much fun to solve. And I did, indeed, solve most of the mystery. The problem is, I am not a fan of plots in which one of the characters has to spend a lot of time explaining what really happened to everyone else, and this happens not once, but twice.With the exception of those two long sections of exposition and the fact that I never did warm up to Jacob Flint, I give everything else in Gallows Court high marks. If you're the type of reader who doesn't mind exposition and has more patience for the callowness of youth, this could be your perfect cup of tea.