Sizar
About this ebook
In the spring of 1826, ex-soldier Gregory Hardiman is settling in to civilian life as an ostler and university constable in Cambridge. When an undergraduate is found hanged in his rooms at St Clement’s College, the Master asks Gregory to find out what could have driven the seemingly happy young man to take such a drastic step. A second death at the same college suggests something altogether more sinister, and Gregory sets out to discover whether a love of illegal gambling on horse races could lie at the heart of the tragedies.
In the second of the Cambridge Hardiman Mysteries, Gregory finds himself on shifting sands – torn between family ties in Spain and the possibility of new affections in Cambridge.
About the author
I have been in love with words ever since I realised, at age three, that those squiggles on the page actually meant something. I edited the school newspaper (is here the place to confess that I was also the author of the section giving all the gossip on who was going out with whom?) and did lots more reading and writing at university (where, of course, I studied English).
For twenty-five years I ran my own anti-money laundering consultancy, which gave me almost limitless opportunity to write about my very favourite subject: money laundering. And the obsession with understanding the mechanics and motivations of financial crime has only grown.
I have spent years haunting the streets of late Regency London, in the company of magistrates' constable Sam Plank. He is the narrator of my series of seven historical financial crime novels set in consecutive years in the 1820s - just before Victoria came to the throne, and in the policing period after the Bow Street Runners and before the Metropolitan Police.
The fourth Sam Plank novel - Portraits of Pretence - was given the "Book of the Year 2017" award by influential book review website Discovering Diamonds. And the fifth - Faith, Hope and Trickery - was shortlisted for the Selfies Award 2019.
And I am now working on a five-book series set in Cambridge in the 1820s, narrated by a university constable called Gregory Hardiman. The first in the series - Ostler - was published in 2023 and shortlisted for the Selfies Book Award 2024. The second in the series - Sizar - was published in December 2024.
