The Last Train to Scarborough

by Andrew Martin Book 6 in the Jim Stringer series.

First published 2009

Amazon

3.5(426)

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, tested or deliberately placed in danger.

The off-season resort, cliffside lodging house and railway connections create a closed world in which attraction, jealousy and violence are difficult to separate. As Jim becomes entangled with the household and its seductive owner Amanda Rickerby, the case grows increasingly threatening. Set only months before the outbreak of the First World War, the novel captures a pre-war Britain that appears familiar but is already close to a historical rupture.