Book
After the Fire
First published 2010
London, 1670. Four years after the Great Fire, actress Betsy Brand is performing at the new Dorset Gardens Theatre when a fellow actor collapses on stage and dies from poison. More deaths follow, turning the playhouse into the centre of a murder investigation that the authorities cannot solve.
Betsy learns that the killings may be connected to a shadowy figure known as the Salamander, whose reputation reaches back to the chaos of the Fire. Moving through the rebuilt and still-scarred city, she uses the observation and improvisation of an actor to test rumours, motives and alibis. The first Betsy Brand mystery combines Restoration theatre with the long aftermath of the disaster that transformed London.
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