LEONORA NATTRASS  chats to PAUL BURKE about her historical mystery thriller SCARLET TOWN, Laurence Jago, 18th century history, rotten boroughs and sapient hog.

SCARLET TOWN 1796. A rigged election. A town at war. A murderer at large...
Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's near imprisonment for libel - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's home town of Helston, Cornwall, in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats.
Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. But it is no easy matter, thanks to the machinations of the rival political factions, not to mention the riotous performances of Toby the Sapient Hog.
Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands...

Leonora Nattrass lectured on the literature and politics of the 18th century for almost ten years before running away to Cornwall, where she now lives in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts and knits the wool of her small flock of Ryeland sheep into elaborate jumpers.
Her first novel Black Drop was a Times Book of the Year and her second Blue Water was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Recommendations
Laura Shepherd Robinson, DV Bishop Abir Mukherjee, Vaseem Khan.
Joseph O'Conner Shadowlands

Scarlet Town Review on Crime Fiction Lover 

Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.

Music courtesy of  Guy Hale author of The Comeback Trail trilogy, featuring Jimmy Wayne - KILLING ME SOFTLY - MIKE ZITO featuring Kid Anderson.
GUY HALE 

Produced by Junkyard Dog

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