Gallows Thief (Hardcover)

By setting Gallows Thief in the Regency period, Bernard Cornwell is able to use his customary skills of characterisation and razor-sharp plotting against a vividly realised new backdrop.

It is Britain in the 1820s. After the wars with France, with unemployment high and soldiers paid off, the government lives in mortal fear of social unrest. The solution is draconian punishment for any crime, and thousands die on the gallows. But despite this, it was possible to petition the King and instigate an investigation. Cornwell's new hero Rider Sandman is a hero of Waterloo struggling to repay his family debts when he becomes involved in the case of a man waiting to be hanged in Newgate prison. Given the job by the Home Secretary of investigating the man's guilt or innocence, Sandman finds himself knee-deep in labyrinthine plots involving bribes, sedition and a massive conspiracy of silence. As this suggests, the contemporary parallels are never far away.

The world Cornwell has conjured for us is as richly drawn as any in his distinguished career: gentlemen's clubs and taverns, haughty aristocrats, fashionable painters and their mistresses, and professional cut-throats; all this creates a heady melange that is just as impressive as anything in Cornwell's Sharpe series. --Barry Forshaw

'What a very fine writer Mr Cornwell has become.' THE ECONOMIST

It is 1817, two years after the battle of Waterloo has ended the Napoleonic wars, and the gallows of Newgate Prison are particularly busy. Justice is cursory and the public, avid for sensation and missing wartime excitement, cram the surrounding streets to salivate over the sight of the condemned in their death-throes. In the filthy underground prison, Charles Corday, an 18-year-old apprentice portrait painter who has been made scapegoat for an unprincipled aristocrat, awaits his end. Unusually, the Home Secretary heeds a complaint about unfair conviction and orders an investigation into the case. Captain Rider Sandman - impoverished veteran of Waterloo and famous cricketer - accepts the assignment on Corday's behalf. He feels sure justice been flouted, but he has just five days to prove his case, the one witness he needs has disappeared and a lot of people are anxious for him to fail. Daring and courageous, with a quelling eye, a fast sword-arm and a useful ability to shoot straight, Sandman needs all the ingenuity he can muster as he battles against the corruption and unscrupulousness of Regency high society. In this fast-moving new novel, Cornwell writes with vigour and expertise about a period and society which shocks us with its extremes of affluence and destitution, its callous disregard for suffering and the ease with which it turns misery and fear into a circus. (Kirkus UK)

A washed-ashore Cape Codder for the past 20 years, Cornwell has published 18 Richard Sharpe British historicals about soldiering during the Napoleonic Wars (Sharpe's Triumph, 2002), nearly a dozen of which have been seen on PBS. He now abandons Sharpe and embarks on a lively novel against capital punishment, set in England in the post-Napoleonic Wars period, known as the Regency, during which crop failures have undermined the lavishly wealthy style of London's highborn. Indeed, when Rider Sandman, a hero back from Waterloo, finds that his family has gone bust, he must now support himself as an investigator for the Crown who looks into capital cases. During this particular period, the Crown hands out death sentences like playing cards, even for minor crimes by children. When the artist Charles Corday is accused of the rape and murder of a lady, Sandman has but a few days to find the real perp before Corday is hanged. His investigation takes him through strongly drawn fashionable and grimy levels of London, including an overstuffed Newgate Prison. And it is a trail that may prove fatal to Sandman himself. Does the title tell too much? Or will Sandman fail? Standard Cornwell, this time with enough effluvial smells to make a bloodhound hold its breath. (Kirkus Reviews)