Showing results for title "Sergeant Cribb", by author "Peter Lovesey" in Literature & Fiction

London, 1889: After Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat became a Victorian best seller, rowing on the Thames was the great craze of 1889. When an elementary school teacher in training takes a midnight swim in the Thames and witnesses a body being dumped, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackerey are called to investigate. They uncover strange parallels with the enormously popular Victorian novel, but nobody will take them seriously. Following their instincts, they stick doggedly to the trail, which leads upstream to Oxford.

London, 1888. Though the beautiful Miriam Cromer has confessed to the murder of her husband’s assistant, she is still confident of her acquittal. But then, she is sentenced to hang. She blames her husband, but he has an alibi. Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray must discover what really happened at Park Lodge on 12th March, 1888, and quickly.

The spiritualist movement has captivated a segment of society: manifestations, the occult, and “sensitives” are in vogue. But the séance sites seem to be targeted for burglaries. Then, while Cribb is on the case, someone murders the medium. There was a great vogue for table-turning and getting in touch with the dead in Victorian times, and this lent itself to fraud, at the very least. It seemed inevitable that Cribb and Thackeray should take part in a séance at some stage. They come to it indirectly, following an art theft.

London, 1884: A series of bomb blasts in public places is causing mayhem throughout the city. Even Scotland Yard’s CID office becomes a target, throwing suspicion on Constable Thackeray. The primary suspects are Irish terrorists seeking independence, but could the villain be someone else? A beautiful Irish woman? An American athlete? Sergeant Cribb reluctantly enrolls in a bomb-making course and infiltrates the Dynamite Party.