Bright and ambitious, young Jim Stringer moves from the English countryside to London deter- mined to become a railway man. It is 1903, the dawn of the Edwardian age, when steam runs the nation and the railways drive progress. Jim can’t believe his luck to have gotten his foot in the door at South East Railway, run out of Waterloo Station. He finds, however, that his duties involve a graveyard shift, literally—a railway line that takes coffins from London morgues to the gigantic new cemeteries being dug in the city’s outskirts. He also learns that his predecessor had disappeared and that his coworkers seem to have formed an instant loathing for him. Forced to live by his wits and to arrive at his own deductions—assisted by his landlady, for whom he falls—he tries to figure out what is going on before he is issued a one-way ticket on the Necropolis Railway.

When railwayman Jim Stringer is assigned to drive holidaymakers to the seaside resort of Blackpool in the hot summer of 1905, he thinks he's struck lucky. But his dreams of beer and pretty women soon fall away - when his high-speed train meets a huge millstone on the line. In the months that follow as he hunts for the saboteur, Jim is drawn into a beguiling but dangerous world of eccentrics, conmen and cowards. From ventriloquists to funfair salesmen, ticket clerks to dandies, everyone is a suspect in this captivating adventure.

Edwardian detective Jim Stringer goes undercover into the Yorkshire underworld of drifters, pickpockets and train-robbers.

ANDREW MARTIN

As Britain edges towards the First World War, railway detective Jim Stringer escorts a young aristocrat, Hugh Lambert, due to be hanged for murdering his father. After Hugh warns that another murder is imminent in his remote village, Jim uncovers a conspiracy of international dimensions.

One night, in a private boarding house in Scarborough, a railway man vanishes, leaving his belongings behind... It is the eve of the Great War, and Jim Stringer, railway detective, is uneasy about his next assignment. It's not so much the prospect Scarborough in the gloomy off-season that bothers him, or even the fact that the last railway man to stay in the house has disappeared without trace. It's more that his governor, Chief Inspector Saul Weatherhill, seems to be deliberately holding back details of the case - and that he's been sent to Scarborough with a trigger-happy assistant. And when Jim encounters the seductive and beautiful Amanda Rickerby a whole new personal danger enters Jim's life...

The Somme Stations plunges into the horrors of World War One trench combat. Stringer and his unit must undertake dangerous nocturnal assignments: driving the trains taking munitions to the front. Death is everywhere, as the trains travel through blasted surrealistic landscapes, and a single-minded military policeman continues to investigate a killing that occurred before the departure for France.

Baghdad 1917. Captain Jim Stringer, invalided from the Western Front, has been dispatched to investigate what looks like a nasty case of treason. He arrives to find a city on the point of insurrection, his cover apparently blown - and his only contact lying dead with flies in his eyes. As Baghdad swelters in a particularly torrid summer, the heat alone threatens the lives of the British soldiers who occupy the city. The recently ejected Turks are still a danger - and many of the local Arabs are none too friendly either. For Jim, who is not particularly good in warm weather, the situation grows pricklier by the day. Aside from his investigation, he is working on the railways around the city. His boss is the charming, enigmatic Lieutenant-Colonel Shepherd, who presides over the gracious dining society called The Baghdad Railway Club - and who may or may not be a Turkish agent. Jim's search for the truth brings him up against murderous violence in a heat-dazed, labyrinthine city where an enemy awaits around every corner.

North East India, 1923. On the broiling Night Mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur, a man is shot dead in a first class compartment. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer was sleeping in the next compartment along. Was he the intended target? Jim should have known that his secondment to the East Indian Railway, with a roving brief to inspect security arrangements, would not be the working holiday he had hoped for. The country seethes with political and racial tension. Aside from the Jamalpur shooting, someone is placing venomous snakes - including giant king cobras - in the first class compartments of the railway. Jim also has worries on the home front: his daughter has formed a connection with a Maharajah's son, who may in turn have a connection to Jim's incredibly rude colleague, the bristling Major Fisher. Jim must do everything he can to keep his family safe from harm, as he unravels the intrigues that surround him ...

'A great deal of well-researched railway detail \[and\] killer lines, without which no Andrew Martin novel is complete' Irish TimesOn a chilly December evening in 1925, while walking to meet his wife at York railway station, detective inspector Jim Stringer finds himself face to face with a man pointing a revolver straight at him. In a flash Jim's thoughts go spinning back to a hot day at the end of August, when he attended a Wild West sideshow at the York Summer Gala with his boss, Superintendent Saul Weatherill, aka 'the Chief'. He remembers the moody young sharpshooter who led the show, his strange Arizonian yet English accent, and above all, his deadeye skills...Andrew Martin's much-loved railway policeman Jim Stringer returns in his most dangerous investigation yet.