The Silver Locomotive Mystery
The sixth book in the Railway Detective series of Victorian mysteries, The Silver Locomotive Mystery brings back Inspector Robert Colbeck, Sergeant Victor Leeming and Madeleine Andrews, the woman Colbeck is in love with. This time, Colbeck and Leeming are in Cardiff, on the track of the thief who has stolen a silver coffee-pot in the shape of a train and murdered the young silversmith who was delivering it to the owners.
In the course of their enquiries they meet some splendidly drawn characters – over-the-top members of an acting troupe, the clever and refined mistress of a local business magnate, and not least the selfishly callous wife of the man who had commissioned the coffee-pot. As the case proceeds, their suspects include a missing son, and an actress who disappears. With a final neat twist, on both the professional and personal levels for Colbeck, this novel is an enjoyable addition to a crime series that has an interesting background and always manages to deliver an enthralling whodunit. Plus, Edward Marston has the trick of giving you enough information to make the historical ambience real, without overloading the reader with so much extraneous detail that it holds up the story.
