Fortuna's Deadly Shadow

1893: A train to the bustling industrial town of Pontypridd crashes, and in the chaos of the disaster a killer covers up a violent murder. Two years later Thomas Chard's arrival to take up his post as inspector in the burgeoning police force coincides with the grisly discovery of a body in the River Taff. Chard grapples with the demands of his new job - rudimentary Victorian police procedures, an authoritarian superintendent, and finding a murderer. His investigations lead him beyond respectable society, through the dark back streets of Pontypridd to a seamy world of money lenders, pick pockets, prostitutes and gamblers. As the number of suspects grows, each with their own secret to protect, Chard must disentangle the web of lies being spun around him in order to catch a killer.

Leslie Scase was born and educated in South Wales, and worked in local industry before travelling widely across the UK during a long career in the Civil Service. Fortuna's Deadly Shadow, his first work of fiction, was inspired by his Italian and English ancestors, who settled in South Wales in the nineteenth century. A keen fly fisherman, he now lives in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. His new novel, Fatal Solution, the second in the Inspector Chard series, is published in April 2021.