Crooked Mile. The Kelsford Casebook Volume One.

‘…Connor’s mind raced to find some way to avert what was about to happen. Behind him there was the heavy click of a revolver being cocked. It was a simple choice. Open the door and accept the judge’s decision, or plead for mercy and be shot in the back…’

On a cold winter’s night, just before Christmas 1887, an event occurred in a public house in the small market town of Kelsford which was to set in motion a train of events which no one could have foreseen…

A bungled robbery of the Shires Canal Company payroll by a unit of the Fenian Irish Brotherhood, followed by the murder, on a deserted towpath, of one of the gang members…

And the suspicious death of a local hack master. What is the role played by Ruth Samuels – a wealthy widow and banker in the secret Jewish organisation, ‘The Pipeline’?

For Thomas Norton of the Kelsford Detective Department, this was to be an enquiry which would move across Europe into the Tsarist Empire and back to New York, before plunging into the sinister alleyways of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel.

About the Author

Ben Beazley was a policeman for almost thirty years. A keen local historian, he is also the author of a number of books on his home town of Leicester as well as three novels.