The Excursion Train: The Railway Detective, Book 2

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.

Faced with what initially appears to be a motiveless murder, Colbeck is intrigued by the murder weapon - a noose.

When it emerges that the victim had worked as a public executioner, Colbeck realises that this must be intrinsically linked to the killer's choice of weapon. However, the further he delves into the case, the more mysterious it becomes. And when a second man is strangled by a noose on a train, Colbeck knows that he must act quickly. Can he catch the murderer before more lives are lost?

Set in Victorian England and rich in historical detail, The Excursion Train will hold you captivated from the beginning to the end of its journey.

Read more AMAZON.COM REVIEW
Murder in the midst of merriment can be the most shocking sort, and so it is in the case of Jacob Bransby--brutally strangled with a length of wire while on board a train carriage crowded with lowlife Londoners, all bound for an illegal bare-knuckle prizefight in Berkshire in 1852. That the deceased's wallet was not purloined leaves Scotland Yard Inspector Robert Colbeck wondering at the motive for this heinous act--and, soon, additional crimes--in The Excursion Train, Edward Marston's second witty, railroad-tied Colbeck escapade (after The Railway Detective) .

It doesn't take the foppish flatfoot long, though, to realize that "Bransby" was an alias, behind which hid a veteran public executioner, notorious both for his religious mania and his appalling incompetence with a hangman's noose. While the deceased's suffering spouse lives in denial of her husband's invidious deeds and macabre mementos, and their estranged son operates under his wife's maiden name in order to avoid being treated "as if I was a leper," Colbeck--assisted, as usual, by tenacious Sergeant Victor Leeming--does everything he can to expose the dead man's secrets, and thus flush out a killer. Could this homicide have been committed in retribution for the botched hanging in Kent, a month before, of butcher Nathan Hawkshaw, a generally upstanding individual convicted (despite his protestations of innocence) of hacking to death the alleged rapist of his 16-year-old stepdaughter, Emily? The inspector can only determine that, it seems, by first revisiting the Hawkshaw case--an endeavor that will lead to Leeming's inauspicious beating, an attempted suicide, Colbeck's employment of Madeleine Andrews (the comely conductor's daughter he rescued in The Railway Detective) as his investigative confederate, and yet another slaying on the tracks.



Brimming with whimsical dialogue, full-throttle turns, and a droll cast (especially delightful is priggish police superintendent Edward Tallis) , The Excursion Train might only be faulted for the artlessness of its romantic subplot. British novelist Marston, best known for his Elizabethan theater mysteries (The Counterfeit Crank) , has struck a rich, arcane vein of possibilities by rooting the Colbeck books in the world of railroads--the transformational technology of mid-19th-century England. Colbeck and Leeming have the opportunity in future installments to steam off after malefactors in any queer corner of Victorian Britain. All aboard! --J. Kingston Pierce







REVIEW
"Very few mysteries are set in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Marston takes this important period in history and makes it his own." (Reviewing the Evidence)

"Charmingly written, thoroughly researched, and a most enjoyable follow-up to the first in the series. I for one can't wait to read number three." (Historical Novels Review) ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Marston has written over a hundred books across many series. They range from the era of the Domesday Book to the Home Front during WWI, via Elizabethan theatre and the Regency period. He is best known for the hugely successful Railway Detective series set during Queen Victoria's reign. Read more