Edward Marston

September 1907. George Dillman sets sail from Liverpool to New York on the Lusitania's maiden voyage. Posing as a passenger, Dillman is in fact an undercover detective hired by the Cunard Line to keep an eye out for petty crimes....

When the engines finally met, there was a deafening clash and the Brighton Express twisted and buckled, tipping its carriages on to the other line. It was a scene of utter devastation....

London, 1851. With the opening of the Great Exhibition at hand, interest in mounting in the engineering triumphs of the railways, but not everyone feels like celebrating....

The audience was merry indeed when a third devilish imp bounded onstage to join the two that had been written into the script. But backstage all was uproar....

When Robert Pomeroy, a young undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, finds a letter slipped under his door in the early hours of a rainy day, he flies into a panic. He hurries to the railway station. But he doesn’t reach his destination alive....

Guy Fawkes Night, 1857. Joel Heygate is the popular stationmaster at Exeter St David's railway station - an impressive figure of a man replete with frock coat and top hat, bushy eyebrows and walrus moustache....

December 1860. Headed for the morning shift at the Swindon Locomotive Works is an army of men pouring out of terraced houses built by the GWR, a miniature town and planned community that aims to provide for its employees from cradle to grave....

Nicolas Picard is riding home from Exeter when he's attacked by a snarling wildcat. Yet, when the body is found, there are lacerations on his neck put there by a human hand....

An exquisite silver coffee-pot in the shape of a locomotive is on its way to Cardiff....

The frontier zone of Archenfield in Herefordshire is a no-man's-land, which acts as a bulwark between Norman-controlled English soil and the Welsh border....

Egypt, 1908. George Dillman and Genevieve Masefield, used to the grand opulence of the Cunard cruise line, are at first disappointed with the Marmora, a small, unimpressive ship owned by the P&O shipping line....

Young Imogen Burnhope and her maid Rhoda board a non-stop train to Oxford to visit her Aunt Cassandra, who waits on the platform at Oxford station where the train terminates, to greet them. Only they never arrive....

On the shocking discovery of a passenger's body on the Great Western Railway excursion train, Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck and his assistant, Sergeant Victor Leeming, are dispatched to the scene....

Yorkshire 1855. When Colonel Aubrey Tarleton walks into the path of a speeding train....

When the deathly horrors of the Black Plague decimate the audiences in London’s theatres, the acclaimed troupe of players called Lord Westfield’s Men take to the high road to seek out fresh audiences. But wherever they go, they are thwarted by misfortune, and are baffled by mysteries....

A man’s body is found mutilated in Savernake Forest and the residents of Bedwyn sleep uneasy at night, fearing a monster. When Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret arrive, they discover that the locals are harbouring dark secrets and that the real killer may be closer to home....

November 1907. George Dillman and Genevieve Masefield sail from Liverpool to New York on the maiden voyage of the luxurious Mauretania....

East Anglia, 1861. Alone in a first-class carriage, the Swarbricks are robbed at gunpoint. But when the universally admired Swarbrick fights back, the train robber takes more than money and jewellery, killing the man working to unify East Anglia's tangle of railway networks....

1860, Wimborne, Dorset. Rebecca Tullidge, miserably married to her callous husband, is having an affair. Much to her distress, she trips over her lover's dead body on the railway tracks....

December 1864. As a cold winter wind scours the Worcestershire countryside, an excursion train comes through a tunnel in the Malvern Hills, only to be confronted by a blockage on the line ahead....