Gallows Thief

1820s Britain: after the wars with France, when unemployment was high and soldiers could be paid off, when the government was desperately afraid of social unrest, any crime was drastically punished and thousands were hung. But one could petition the King and an investigation might ensue... The man in the dark cell in Newgate Prison was due to hang in a week. He had been found guilty of murdering the aristocrat whose portrait he was painting. He claimed to be innocent – but then the hangman had never hung a guilty man, he said. But even in 1820, the Home Secretary could occasionally use his powers to grant mercy if his investigator found cause and Rider Sandman, once of the First Foot Guards, is given the job. Rider Sandman, a hero of Waterloo, has family debts to repay but when his first steps in the investigations produce a sizeable bribe to look the other way, this only arouses his smouldering anger over the condition of England, a country which he and others in Wellington's army had fought to preserve. Stepping between gentlemen's clubs and taverns, talking to aristocrats, fashionable painters, their models, and their mistresses, dodging professional cut-throats and deceptive swordsmen, Sandman uncovers a conspiracy of silence, a group whose proudest boast was that they would do anything for any one of them. Sandman is a wonderful character, as yet undaunted by the sleazy streets, dank jails or the looming scaffold, and uncorrupted by politicians, sneering gentlemen or frightening bruisers, an investigator in the making and a brilliant, but very different, hero for all Bernard Cornwell fans. In the cobbled streets outside Newgate Prison, the common and desperate of London gather regularly to enjoy the spectacle of human necks broken at the end of a hangman's rope. For Rider Sandman, newly returned from the Napoleonic Wars, it is not grim entertainment that draws him here, but a mission to prove the guilt or innocence of a condemned prisoner -- a duty that leads Sandman from the hellish bowels of Newgate to the scented drawing rooms of the ruthless and powerful, and into the darkest shadows of the filthy, bustling city, in search of the truth. It is 1817 and Charles Corday, a portrait painter, has only seven days to live. He has been found guilty of murdering a Countess whom he was in the process of painting. He had been sentenced to hang, and political pressures make it expedient for the Home Office to confirm his guilt. The man appointed to investigate is Rider Sandman, whose qualifications for the job are non-existent and who is currently down on his luck. But Sandman's investigations reveal much that does not fit the verdict, and too many people determined to halt his activities A man in Newgate had been found guilty of murdering the aristocrat whose portrait he was painting. Captain Hawkes is given the job of investigating, but when his first steps produce a sizeable bribe to look the other way, it arouses his smouldering anger over the condition of England SIR HENRY FORREST, banker and alderman of the City of London, almost gagged when he entered the Press Yard, for the smell was terrible, worse than the reek of the sewer outflows where the Fleet Ditch oozed into the Thames.