1. The Necropolis Railway
London, 1903. Young railway enthusiast Jim Stringer leaves Yorkshire determined to make a career on the footplate and finds work connected with the London Necropolis Railway, the extraordinary service carrying coffins and mourners from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery. The job is less promising than he imagined:…
2. The Blackpool Highflyer
Yorkshire, 1905. Jim Stringer is working on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and driving excursion traffic towards Blackpool when a huge grindstone is placed on the track, derailing a train and killing a passenger. The attack turns a summer railway outing into a case involving mill…
3. The Lost Luggage Porter
York, winter 1906. Jim Stringer has finally become an official detective for the North Eastern Railway, but his first days in the job are dominated by violence: two brothers are shot dead and the station’s lost-luggage porter points him towards pickpockets and railway thieves operating through…
4. Murder at Deviation Junction
December 1909. In the frozen Cleveland Hills, a train strikes a snowdrift and railwaymen clearing the blocked line discover a body. For Jim Stringer, now struggling to establish himself as a railway detective, the murder becomes a case that reaches far beyond an isolated junction and…
5. Death on a Branch Line
Yorkshire, summer 1911. Railway detective Jim Stringer is sent into the countryside with only a short time to prevent a killing that appears to have been announced before it happens. The branch-line setting looks quiet, but the case draws him into a network of family secrets,…
6. The Last Train to Scarborough
March 1914. Jim Stringer is sent from York to Scarborough to investigate the disappearance of a railwayman from a private boarding house called Paradise. His chief withholds part of the story and assigns him an unpredictable armed assistant, leaving Jim unsure whether he is being protected,…
7. The Somme Stations
France, 1916. Jim Stringer has enlisted and serves with a railway unit supplying the British Army on the Western Front. On the first day of the Somme he is trapped in a shell hole under fire, while an earlier unexplained death within his unit continues to…
8. The Baghdad Railway Club
Baghdad, 1917. Invalided from the Western Front, Captain Jim Stringer is sent to occupied Baghdad to investigate suspected treason. He arrives after British forces have taken the city from the Ottoman Empire, only to find his cover compromised and his expected contact dead. Heat, military tension…
9. Night Train to Jamalpur
North-east India, 1923. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer has been seconded to the East Indian Railway to inspect security when a passenger is shot dead in the first-class compartment next to his own on the night mail from Calcutta to Jamalpur. He cannot be certain whether the…
10. Powder Smoke
York, 1925. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is approaching the railway station on a cold December evening when a man points a revolver at him. The confrontation sends his thoughts back to the end of August, when he and Superintendent Saul Weatherill visited a Wild West sideshow…