Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner Series

For twenty years, England and France have been at war. Now the war has come home…

On a sunny July day in 1815, Plymouth Sound is crowded with boats vying for a view of England’s great battleship HMS Bellerophon. For aboard the vessel is the stout little Frenchman who threw the world into chaos. In London, some people clamor for Napoleon’s execution, others for his exile, and still others for a civil trial on English soil. For one humble London detective, the debate has turned deadly. Bow Street Runner Henry Morton has a murder to solve–and Napoleon himself is at the heart of the matter.

The victim is a Frenchwoman, the mistress of a count. Soon Morton is racing through a demimonde of French expatriates, Bonapartists, fanatical Royalists, and one very dangerous, drunken petty crook. From an exotic London brothel to a scene of carnage on a Dartmoor farm, the detective enters a covert war over Napoleon’s fate. And amid the betrayal, deception, and murder, Morton will face a waterloo of his own.

June 1815. When Henry Morton is called to the scene at Portman House in Claridge Square, the Bow Street constable finds a man dead in a hackney coach–ostensibly of asphyxiation. He was Halbert Glendinning, a gentleman of unsullied character. Then why was he seen frequenting one of London’s most notorious dens of iniquity? And why has the driver of the coach vanished into the night?

While Sir Nathaniel Conant, the chief magistrate at Number 4 Bow Street, accepts the official verdict of accidental death, Morton is certain that Glendinning was a victim of foul play. With the help of actress Arabella Malibrant, one of London’s most celebrated beauties, he embarks on his own discreet inquiry. And as the upper circles of London society close ranks against him, Morton races to unmask a killer whose motives are as complex and unfathomable as the passions that rule the human heart.