Have you finished your holiday shopping yet? Yeah, me neither, and there's always ONE person on your list that seems next to impossible to buy for. You know the one...they never give you a wish list, seem to have everything they want, and just plain seem to want to give you a holiday headache. Well, are they a reader? Do they like MYSTERIES? Take a peek at today's Rachel's Random Resources blog tour guest and title in the spotlight as we share a special excerpt that may just make this top of your gifting list...
The Contraband Killings: A Dan Foster Mystery
by
Lucienne Boyce
About the book...
Principal Officer Dan Foster of the Bow Street Runners is sent to collect smuggler Watcyn Jones from Beaumaris Gaol on Anglesey, and bring him back to London for trial at the Old Bailey. As if having to travel to the wilds of North Wales isn’t bad enough, Dan is saddled with an inexperienced constable as his interpreter and assistant. At least it’s a routine assignment and shouldn’t take more than a few days.
But when the prison escort is ambushed and Watcyn Jones escapes, a straightforward transfer turns into a desperate manhunt. And as Jones’s enemies start to die, the chase becomes more urgent than ever. Dan’s search for the killer brings him up against a ruthless smuggling gang – and his chances of getting off the island alive begin to look far from promising.
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~~~ EXCERPT ~~~
These days if you’re visiting Anglesey by car, all you have to do is drive over the Menai Bridge or the Britannia Bridge. In the eighteenth century travelling from London involved two or three days cooped up in a coach to Bangor (longer if the roads were bad, the weather turned nasty, or the coach broke down), from where you took a ferry across the Menai Strait by boat.
At the least, passengers found this crossing tedious, or fumed about the cost – a shilling per person for ten minutes work! grumbled one traveller. Worse, strong tidal currents could make the crossing dangerous, and it was not unknown for boats to capsize or run aground. In 1785 a boat carrying fifty-five people was stranded on a sandbar. Darkness and high winds hampered rescue attempts, and with the rising of the tide the travellers were swept away. Only one survived.
Dan Foster and his Welsh-speaking assistant, Goronwy Evans, have arrived at Bangor where they face the prospect of crossing the Strait.
At one o’clock on Monday afternoon Dan stood on the landing stage at the George Inn at Bangor, watching two ferrymen piling luggage into their boat. On the Anglesey shore, across the cold grey water lying under a cold grey sky, he saw a long two-storey inn set amongst outhouses and stables. In front of it stood a couple of coaches with their teams harnessed. One was the replacement mail coach that would complete the journey to Holyhead, so there was no need to risk the vehicle they had arrived in on the Strait. Beyond the inn there may have been an island, there may not. The drizzle blotted out all except near objects.
Ferries seemed to attract bad weather. The rain had started as soon as they stepped onto the boat across the estuary at Conwy this morning, had been squalling off and on ever since. The boat had rocked crazily all the way over, and the rowers had warned the passengers to sit quietly in their places. There were a dozen altogether, some of them pale and trembling, others with their eyes firmly shut. There had been relief all round when they reached the shore safely.
Now there was another stretch of heaving water to cross. It did, though, look preferable to the alternative Evans had pointed out to Dan from the top of a steep mountain road after they left Conwy. Dan had looked out of the coach window over a low wall at the edge of the precipice. In some places it was only three or four feet high, in others it disappeared altogether to be replaced by a slight bank which gave all too clear views of the sea lashing the rocks two hundred feet below. Beyond that a bleak extent of sands drifted into the strait.
“If you got a ferry from there, you’d be in Beaumaris directly,” Evans said.
“From where?”
“From the sands. You walked across until you came to the boat, about four miles.”
Dan could not see any roads. “How do we get down there?”
“No one goes that way anymore. It’s too dangerous. Get the timings wrong and you’ll be caught in the incoming tide and drowned. This, the Penmaenmawr road, is the travelling road now. It’s been much improved over the last few years.”
If this was an improvement, Dan supposed that only Welsh mountain goats had used the old road. And someone ought to tell the Conwy to Bangor turnpike trustees to lay out a bit of money on raising the wall.
The luggage on the landing stage belonged to the family huddled nearby, a couple in their fifties and a girl who was no more than eighteen. They had arrived at the George Inn, an impressive building overlooking the Menai Strait from the top of a sloping garden, in a private post chaise. The father had a country squire’s plump and port-coloured complexion. His pendulous lip over an ample double chin and slightly protuberant eyes gave him a perpetually affronted air. This was no false impression, for his conversation was one long complaint.
“If they aren’t careful, they’ll have those portmanteaux in the water. Do these boats never leave when they say they will? Can’t you speak up?” The last to his wife, who had attempted a soothing murmur. She fell into a flustered silence. “And you, miss, what do you find to ogle at?”
His daughter pouted and turned her attention back to her family. “I’m sure I don’t know, Father.”
She had, in fact, been looking at the tall booted figure whose eyes glinted mysteriously from beneath the brim of his hat. Dan had not noticed her interest in him.
The Royal Mail driver approached him and tipped his hat. “I leave you here, sir.”
Dan responded to the well-used phrase as every traveller must. He retrieved a half crown from his purse. With drivers changing every fifty miles or so, he thought, you paid so many tips on top of your fare you could almost buy yourself a coach of your own. But he knew the men relied on the money, their wages not being the most generous. Odd how the men who did the hardest work got the least for it.
The coachman showed his approval by accepting the tip and trudged towards the George.
The guard, Garing, knelt on the roof of the coach and threw down mail bags to the clerk from Bangor Post Office. He jumped down and the two traded paperwork. Garing shouldered the bags which were destined for the Dublin Packet and headed for the slipway. Evans appeared at Dan’s side, having fortified himself against the chill water with a glass of something, and the passengers took their places in the boat.
As soon as they were on the Strait the clouds darkened. The drizzle sank to meet the swell, soaking their coats, the sails, the boat rails, the horses, the halo of the girl’s hair beneath her hood. By the time they stepped out onto the slippery rocks on the other side, the rain was falling in wind-driven sheets and the waves had begun to make the boat a decidedly unpleasant place to be.
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About the author....
Lucienne Boyce writes historical fiction, non-fiction and biography. After gaining an MA in English Literature, specialising in eighteenth-century fiction, she published her first historical novel, To The Fair Land (2012, reissued 2021), an eighteenth-century thriller set in Bristol and the South Seas.
Her second historical novel, Bloodie Bones: A Dan Foster Mystery (2015, reissued 2022) is the first of the Dan Foster Mysteries and follows the fortunes of a Bow Street Runner who is also an amateur pugilist. Bloodie Bones was joint winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016, and was also a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction 2016. The second Dan Foster Mystery, The Butcher’s Block (2017, reissued 2022), was awarded an IndieBrag Medallion in 2018. The third in the series, Death Makes No Distinction (2019, reissued 2022), is also an IndieBrag Medallion honoree, recipient of Chill With a Book Premium Readers’ Award, and a joint Discovering Diamonds book of the month. In 2017 an e-book Dan Foster novella, The Fatal Coin, was published by S-Books. The Fatal Coin is now available in paperback.
The Bristol Suffragettes, a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the South West of England, was published in 2013. In 2017 Lucienne published a collection of short essays, The Road to Representation: Essays on the Women’s Suffrage Campaign.
Other Publications
‘Not So Militant Browne’ in Suffrage Stories: Tales from Knebworth, Stevenage, Hitchin and Letchworth (Stevenage Museum, 2019)
‘Victoria Lidiard’ in The Women Who Built Bristol, Jane Duffus (Tangent Books, 2018)
‘Tramgirls, Tommies and the Vote’ in Bristol and the First World War: The Great Reading Adventure 2014 (Bristol Cultural Development Partnership/Bristol Festival of Ideas, 2014)
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Special thanks to Rachel at Rachel's Random Resources for the chance to bring this tour to you. (THANKS!) For more information on this title, the author, this promotion, or those on the horizon, feel free to click through the links provided above. Be sure to check out the rest of the tour for more bookish fun!
Until next time, remember...if it looks good, READ IT!
