Powder Smoke

by Andrew Martin Book 10 in the Jim Stringer series.

First published 2021

Amazon

4.0(267)

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 at the York Summer Gala and watched the young sharpshooter Kid Durrant demonstrate his skill with firearms.

The performance becomes the starting point for an investigation in which theatrical gunplay and real violence begin to overlap. Jim must trace how the people surrounding the sideshow connect to the threat now facing him and his family. The novel returns the series to interwar York, where imported American popular culture, railway policing and the social changes of the 1920s meet in a case built around firearms and concealed identities.