Preston novels

Investigating the drowning death of his wife's uncle against a backdrop of a contentious election, eighteenth-century coroner Titus Cragg receives information that suggests foul play, a situation that is complicated by the demise of a politically connected farmer.

"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, Cragg's inquiry falls foul of a cabal of merchants dead set on modernizing the town's economy and regarding the despised tanners--and Cragg's apparent championship of them--as obstacles...

"November, 1745. Preston, Lancashire. Rumours abound that Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, has landed in Scotland, intent on marching south to claim the English throne. Meanwhile, a headless body is discovered in an icy pond. Coroner Titus Cragg thinks he has a lead when a head is eventually found - only to discover that it belongs to a different body. Could there be a connection to the approaching rebel army? Or is someone using the Highlanders'...

"When a blackened body is discovered buried beneath a hot-house, Coroner Titus Cragg uncovers a tale of scandalous secrets stretching back almost twenty years. Coroner Cragg. You think you can find out what happened at this house? You are mistaken. You can never find out. November, 1747. County Coroner Titus Cragg has been called to the scene of a gruesome slaughter at a rural farmhouse: a mother and her four children brutally murdered in their own...