Guest Blogger Gillean Somerville Arjat reviews : The Scrivener by Robin Blake

Robin Blake, The Scrivener, A Cragg and Fidelis Mystery, Constable, 2015.  Once again my friend Gillean Somervill- Arjat has come up with the goods in this  lovely review of The Scrivener by Robin Blake.  This is the third of Robin Blake’s series of historical crime novels set in Preston in the early 1740s, when the present city was a small provincial town, famous for two royalist defeats, one by Cromwell in 1648, the other during the Jacobite uprising of 1715.

When a poor, ailing peasant unearths a stash of hidden silver on the moor above the town hopes are high that he has found a long lost hoard of town treasure from the Civil War. The mayor is in a panic because local pawnbroker and aspiring banker, Philip Pimbo, has died at his desk in mysterious circumstances and with him has gone the money for the forthcoming Festival Guild, lent to him by the mayor on the assurance of a dead cert investment.

Twin pillars of the community, coroner, Titus Cragg, and his great friend, shrewd physician, Luke Fidelis, are tasked with unravelling the mystery. At the heart of Pimbo’s affairs is a certain entrepreneurial fixer from the port of Liverpool, Zadok Moon. There is much summoning of and waiting for Mr Moon to put in an appearance, but he proves elusive. What is going on?

Blake knows the area and its history well and has woven a complex and absorbing story, which takes as its central theme the ignominious slave trade of the period and associated dodgy financial dealings. There is a cast of intriguing characters: an enigmatic housekeeper with a withered arm, an old lady with dementia, a black servant with a cross-dressing disguise, a cultivated and obliging lady in Liverpool, not to mention a thorough-going villain. And in the end, was it murder or suicide that finished Pimbo off? A great read.

Available on Amazon Kindle £10.99, HB £16.58 or PB £7.99
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scrivener-Cragg-Fidelis-Historical-Crime-ebook/dp/B00T6KVGXK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432636475&sr=1-1&keywords=the+scrivener+robin+blake