So you’re sitting with your boiled egg, toast and coffee thinking ‘How can I entertain my mind today?’ Ah! plunge myself into a consummately realised 18th-century London of crime, horror and squalor. Excellent. You’ll discover that Tom Hawkins has been luxuriating in the capital’s fleshpots when he’s consigned to the debtors’ prison, Marshalsea. The gruesome murder of a fellow debtor spreads fear among the inmates, and the man in the frame is the much-feared Samuel Fleet, with whom Tom is sharing a cell. Such is the atmosphere and quality of Hodgson’s (http://www.antoniahodgson.com/) writing that the term ‘Dickensian’ seems wholly appropriate as a compliment.
400 pages in Hodder paperback
Published
ISBN 978-1444775433
Antonia Hodgson