The year is 1740. George II is on the throne, but England’s remoter provinces remain largely a law unto themselves. In Lancashire a grim discovery has been made: a squire’s wife, Dolores Brockletower, lies in the woods above her home at Garlick Hall, her throat brutally slashed.Called to the scene, Coroner Titus Cragg finds the Brockletower household awash with rumour and suspicion. He enlists the help of his astute young friend, doctor Luke Fidelis, to throw light on the case. But...

Blake, an author living in London, explains that the impetus for this biography of the great Dutch painter came from his own connection in childhood to a painting purchased by his grandmother

Preston, 1741. The drowning of drunken publican Antony Egan is no surprise – even if it comes as unpleasant shock to coroner Titus Cragg, whose wife is the old man’s niece. But he does his duty to the letter, and the inquest’s verdict is accidental death.But Cragg’s close friend Luke Fidelis finds evidence to cast doubt on the events leading up to Egan’s demise. Soon, suspicions are roused still further when a well-to-do farmer collapses and it appears he was in town on political b...

The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker Philip Pimbo, apparently shot behind the locked door of his office. Is it suicide? Coroner Titus Cragg suspects so, but Dr Luke Fidelis disagrees. To untangle the truth Cragg must dig out the secrets of Pimbo's pe...

In The Hidden Man, Robin Blake continues the series Booklist calls "a solid winner" with a darkly rich mystery centered on an apparent suicide that leads Cragg and Fidelis down a treacherous path.The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbr...

Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the highest importance, on a par with his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. An artist-scientist who emulated Leonardo da Vinci, Stubbs tirelessly explored the natural world, and new ways of representing it.Born the son of a Liverpool tradesman, Stubbs was self-taught and at first struggled in obscurity as a northern provincial painter. Robin Blake's book uncovers Stubbs's...

Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the highest importance, on a par with his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. An artist-scientist who emulated Leonardo da Vinci, Stubbs tirelessly explored the natural world, and new ways of representing it.Born the son of a Liverpool tradesman, Stubbs was self-taught and at first struggled in obscurity as a northern provincial painter. Robin Blake's book uncovers Stubbs's...

In this mystery series debut, a coroner and a doctor investigate when the murder of a squire's wife rattles a superstitious seventeenth-century English town."A fascinating examination of how crimes could have been solved before the nineteenth century gave us the rudiments of forensic science. Cragg and Fidelis make a terrific detecting duo. . . . Blake's writing is direct and crisp. In addition, his knowledge of an eighteenth-century backwater just shaking o...

1743, and the tanners of Preston are a pariah community, plying their unwholesome trade beside a stretch of riverside marsh where many Prestonians by ancient right graze their livestock. When the body of a newborn child is found in one of their tanning pits, Cragg's enquiry falls foul of a cabal of merchants, dead set on modernising the town's economy and regarding the despised tanners - and Cragg's apparent championship of them - as obstacles to their plan. The murder of a baby is just th...

Blake's A Dark Anatomy has been called "impressive" ( Publishers Weekly) and "a solid winner" ( Booklist) and Dark Waters, the second book in the Cragg & Fidelis series, will leave readers hungry for morePreston, 1741. The drowning of drunken publican Antony Egan is no surprise-even if it comes as an unpleasant shock to coroner Titus Cragg, whose wife was the old man's niece. But he does his duty to the letter, and the inquest's verdict is acciden...

A coroner and a doctor team up in a forensic investigation to find a baby killer in this historical mystery set in 18th century England.It's 1743, and the tanners of Preston are a pariah community, plying their unwholesome trade beside a stretch of riverside marsh where many Prestonians by ancient right graze their livestock. When the body of a newborn child is found in one of their tanning pits, Coroner Titus Cragg is called to the scene. But his inquiry falls fou...

One woman learns the secrets of the five Jaeger brothers in the new romance from New York Times bestselling author Penelope Douglas.On the other side of town, in the dark glades, under the rain…Macon is the oldest. Thirty-one. Ex-Marine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile.Army is twenty-eight. A single dad with the most beautiful green eyes. He has no idea who he is, if not a Jaeger brother.Iron will be in prison soon. ...