The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2012

  $3.25

  Meet Inigo Bright. He's a bored young lawyer working in Bristol after the abolition of the slave trade. A frustrated artist, at odds with his wealthy merchant family, and engaged to a girl he no longer loves, Inigo's dissatisfaction is complete when his boss and mentor, Adam Carthy, charges him with the numbing task of reconciling years of port fees and import duties for the newly formed Dock Company. But detail is the devil's mask. Inigo's routine investigation leads him to The Belsize, a ship newly returned from the Indies, laden with rum, sugar, tobacco, and a chilling secret. Those in the city whose interests the secret protects move swiftly and savagely to keep the truth hidden at all costs. Before long Inigo, his boss and family, are implicated and under threat. A cover-up seems the only way out. But Inigo has linked the case to a charred corpse found on a building site in the rising district of Clifton and soon there are other bodies to account for, too.

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.25

  The Georgian terraces are rising. In the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade, the port of Bristol is awash with the commercial gains of the Empire. But in the midst of all the grand building projects something is rotten at the heart of the city. The first victim is discovered. News of the mutilated body speeds quickly. And as further horrifically charred corpses are found, the new streets are gripped with a primal sense of fear. The city fathers decide to step in to suppress the rising panic. An innocent is drawn into the tangled net. A lowly legal clerk with a taste for coffee, Inigo Bright has been charged with investigating customs fees in the great port. Yet this routine investigation will drag him down in a net of violence and deception that puts not only his life but that of those closest to him in deadly danger...