Soot - Andrew Martin
York, 1799. Fletcher Rigge has been hired to carry out an investigation by the son of a gentleman who has recently been murdered. Matthew Harvey was a portrait artist specialising in ‘shades’ - silhouetted portraits of his sitters. His son, Captain Harvey has reason to suspect that the murder may be among one of the six last portraits he made during Race Week. The suspicion is confirmed by the fact that the names of the sitters have been torn from the ledger, so all Fletcher Rigge has to go on to find the six clients is the shadowed profiles that exist of them in copies that the artist has kept. That’s an interesting basis for a murder-mystery enquiry, but there are a few other peculiarities about Andrew Martin’s Soot . First of all, Fletcher Rigge is no 18th century private investigator, but rather a bookseller and writer who currently resides in debtor’s prison. Captain Harvey (with his wonderfully eccentric and dissolute companion-servants) has however heard of the bookseller’s keen...