Crime and Thrillers
Captain Hazard’s Game, third in the Chocolate House Mysteries series, conjures up the vibrant life of early eighteenth-century gamesters and money-men, a world of deception where risk could bring huge rewards – especially when you turned the stock-market by false news or shortened the odds by cheating. It was a scene where all was in hazard and life lived on the edge.
The book weaves its classic murder mystery around actual events of October 1708, and we move among a rich cast of characters, both in Vandernan’s gaming-house, Covent Garden, and the notorious Exchange Alley.
Playing Captain Hazard’s Game brings murder and scandal uncomfortably close, and Widow Trotter and her friends at the Bay-Tree are drawn into a frenzied game of chance and speculation at a time when the market was unregulated. Fortunes were made overnight, and ruin could descend in a single hour. People played for the highest stakes, and men of power manipulated things for their own ends. In this book the chocolate house itself comes under threat as Mary Trotter, with help from her young friends Tom and Will, struggles to find the truth behind an ingenious system of deception. Once again, she presides over the novel, as she does over the Bay-Tree, with good humour, fierce integrity, and resolute determination.
Here's what readers have to say about this book....
David Fairer, for his third book situated in London beginning of the 18th century, has achieved a masterpiece. It is possible to read this book without the need to read the previous ones. Everything is perfect. The intrigue, the chase, the suspense, the ending. It is not a time travel book yet the descriptions of the atmosphere, the sounds, the people is a pure joy. Also, ingeniously, the author is not writing about a detective agency; The characters have some huge cases to solve, but they do not act as in the 21st century. They work altogether, treading their way through the issues of their century with the manoeuvres at their disposal. This makes the book all the more appealing. A lot is to be learnt through the story in a very exciting way. The opening scene of anthology sets the pace for the whole book. At mid-path between Alexandre Dumas and Ian Flemming, the author writes with nerves, and he explores the birth of the financial system in the City with gusto. This is a book to be read by any student in economics and finance, and anyone interested in how to avoid being misled when investing ! Fun with great quality of information about how to be suspicious !