Book
Thief!
First published 2009
Fourteen-year-old actor Ben Button returns to his family in the village of Hornsey after two years with the travelling players. Home is less welcoming than he hoped: his widowed mother is being courted, his younger brother resents his departure, and his grandmother has become an angry recluse who refuses visitors.
A series of village robberies gives Ben a reason to work with the local constable, but the inquiry becomes more serious when it develops into a murder hunt and exposes secrets inside his own family. Unlike the earlier theatre-centred adventures, the fourth Elizabethan Mysteries novel focuses on rural life, harvest work, family obligation and the limited choices available to a poor widow and her children in Tudor England.
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