Why a Booktrail?
The second in the Murder Squad series sees the two detectives head up to the industrial heartland of Victorian England
The Black Country
What you need to know before your trail
Members of a prominent family disappear from a coal-mining village
Something very gruesome indeed is found in a bird’s nest
Welcome to the Black Country….
Inspector Walter Day and Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith of the Murder Squad in London come up to investigate but they cannot begin to imagine what exactly they will find there.
The villagers are exactly the talkative kind and are suspicious of strangers whoever they might be. Everybody has a secret – the population are sinking in them. That’s if the village doesn’t sink into the mines below the ground beforehand.
Travel Guide
The Victorian period was certainly not the faint hearted as you will see from the nature of the cases in this novel! There are more than one or two gruesome scenes which might well turn your stomach.
The setting itself is an interesting one since it is a small pit mining village which is built above the mines it is known for. Needless to say that the ground is prone to weaknesses and some of the houses and buildings are literally sinking into it. Add to this, a strange sort of sickness that seems to be gradually spreading from one person to another and it’s not the place that you would care to stay for long.
Once the police arrive, they find themselves isolated and unwelcome – a cloud of suspicion seems to follow them as no one in the village wants to talk to them or are happy that they are there at all. The sense of unease and the closed community are evoked well.
Day smiled and looked past the station to the snowy field and far beyond it, the pit mounds, the huge tanks of steaming wastewater, the tiny engine houses, and the iced-over stream that wound past them all.
There is also a thread throughout of a fictional monster known as ‘Rawhead’ is a belief held strongly by those in the village – an evil that lives in the woods nearby. Evokes a strong sense of identity, belief system, way of thinking and also a strange black cloud which permeates everything in its path.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: The Black Country
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