FICTION Trade secrets
NICK RENNISON enjoys an intricately plotted murder mystery set during the campaign to abolish slavery
Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson Mantle, 448 pages, £14.99
In the early hours of a midsummer morning in June 1781, the body of a man is found hanging from a pole in Deptford Dockyard. He is naked and bears the marks of torture. His throat has been cut and, although he is white, he has been branded as if he were a black slave. The murder victim is identified as Thaddeus Archer, a barrister and a dedicated campaigner for the abolition of slavery. Captain Harry Corsham, Archer’s old friend from his days at Oxford, travels to Deptford to discover what happened.
The narrator of this accomplished debut novel, Harry is a heroic veteran of Britain’s war against its rebellious American colonies. He has witnessed terrible things, but nothing prepares him for what he unearths as he investigates the murder. Archer, it emerges, came to Deptford on the trail of a story he believed would destroy the slave trade for ever: he’d heard rumours of a voyage during which hundreds of slaves were cold-bloodedly thrown into the ocean to drown. News of this atrocity, he hoped, would alter public perceptions of slavery. (The massacre in Shepherd-Robinson’s book is invented, but echoes the real-life mass killing on the British slave ship the Zong in 1781.) Has the lawyer been slain to keep him silent? Or are there more personal motives for his murder?
As Harry plunges ever further into the brutal world his friend wanted to expose, his own life is placed in danger. The tentacles of the slave trade reach into the very heart of the British establishment, and there are people who will stop at nothing to keep its secrets hidden.
Both an intricately plotted murder mystery and a vivid evocation of the darker side of 18th-century life, Blood & Sugar is a powerful, thoroughly absorbing thriller.