Day one into his new job and Constable Hope's got problems. Fat old Sergent Glorey's out to get him, his mysterious and compelling landlady has him mesmerised with her secret ways and her cooking, the townsfolk distrust him and to top it all he keeps having dark thoughts. Nothing as dark as the crimes of the people living in and around the district. In a landscape of aching beauty seeped in ancient customs and half remembered legends he must get a grip on himself before he can police the townsfolk. Constable John Hope had been brought up in the back streets of Victorian Derby. It seemed a dream come true when he was given his first job in the picture postcard market town, just as King Edward VII became King Emperor. But Hope soon finds he is lodging with a woman that many in the town think scandalous, and that he is working with a bullying comic fool of a Sergeant. Hours into his first day he discovers he has to confront and police the local gang that has ruled the town since Tudor times. Hope finds himself involved in investigations of thefts, murders and vicious sex crimes. And, as he embarks on his career he has no idea of the horrors to come and the ultimate betrayal he will face later in life from a force much more sinister and powerful than the town's rural mafia. Set in a beautiful and sometimes bleak landscape, and spanning the years from 1902 to 1953, Land of Hope and Glorey is the first in a series of books that chronicles the life, times and crimes of a market town in the heart of the Derbyshire Peak District.