Beau Blackstone

Edmund Blackstone, Bow Street Runner, poured ale over his clothes, and rubbed his fingernails against the stone wall until they were cracked and jagged. Then he dishevelled his hair, rubbing a little grease into it. The whole process offended him but he persevered, massaging soil into his hands until they had a dirty polish about them, yet still they didn't have the saddle-hard palms which you got wielding a shovel for twelve hours or more every day. For that was what he would have to do -- Edmund Blackstone, navigator or navvy.

'If you're on the run, ' Molly said, 'take my advice, go back to the canals. There's only a couple of months' work left on this bloody railway. And you'll have to put up with Petro.'

'Who's Petro?' Blackstone asked. Although he knew.

'Calls himself king of the navvies. Everyone's scared of him, even the contractors. Don't cross him.'

But how else, Blackstone wondered, was he to discover who was behind the theft of the navvies' wages? Who stood to gain if the world's pioneer public steam locomotive railway, the Stockton and Darlington, failed to open? In chasing the answers Blackstone unearths a plot to pull the world's first Great Train Robbery.

Beau Blackstone is the third Blackstone novel.