Alfred and Ettie Palmer are back for another stunning standalone Victorian mystery.
Wrexham, 1884. Eight years earlier they’d been warned never again to interfere with police business. But it seems their skills are needed once more. A body deliberately drowned but left abandoned on the banks of the River Dee. A mysterious tattoo. Then two further murders, each more bizarre than the last – killings which draw them ever further into a circle of unlikely allies, eccentric suspects, old enemies, and the murky world of Fenian plots and bombings. A kidnapping. An attempted rescue among the tombstones of Chester’s Overleigh Cemetery. And a terrifying May Day climax. But why Wrexham? Why the River Dee? And have the true culprits really been identified? Another glittering mystery by award-winning author David Ebsworth.
"David Ebsworth’s immersive body of work demonstrates a keen eye for historical detail.”
– Vaseem Khan, best-selling author and chair of the UK Crime Writers’ Association
David Ebsworth is the pen name of writer Dave McCall, a former negotiator and workers' representative for Britain's Transport & General Workers' Union. He was born in Liverpool but has lived in Wrexham, North Wales, with his wife, Ann, since 1981.
Following his retirement, Dave began to write historical fiction in 2009 and has now subsequently published twelve novels: political thrillers set against the history of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, the Battle of Waterloo, warlord rivalry in Sixth Century Britain, and the Spanish Civil War. His sixth book, Until the Curtain Falls returned to that same Spanish conflict, following the story of journalist Jack Telford, and is published in Spanish under the title Hasta Que Caiga el Telon. Jack Telford, as it happens, is also the main protagonist in a separate novella, The Lisbon Labyrinth. The third of his Jack Telford novels, A Betrayal of Heroes, takes Jack into the turmoil of the Second World War but through a series of real-life episodes, which are truly stranger than fiction.
Dave's Yale Trilogy tells the story of intrigue and mayhem around nabob, philanthropist (and slave-trader) Elihu Yale - who gave his name to Yale University - but told through the eyes of his much-maligned and largely forgotten wife, Catherine.
The eleventh novel, The House on Hunter Street, is a mystery set during the political turmoil of Liverpool in 1911 and, more recently, Dave has published a non-fiction guidebook of Wrexham history, Wrexham Revealed. It was his research for the guidebook which inspired him to write his twelfth novel, Blood Among The Threads, and this, its sequel, Death Along The Dee.
Each of Dave's novels has been critically acclaimed by the Historical Novel Society and been awarded the coveted B.R.A.G. Medallion for independent authors. He is also a member of the Crime Cymru Welsh writers' collective.
