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Espionage, witchcraft, gore and spellbinding language propel an exciting historical adventureAlex Preston’s fourth novel sprang from the notion of crafting a “grown-up” Moonfleet, he explains in his acknowledgments, adding “I hope this is close”. For anyone who’s familiar with J Meade Falkner’s swashbuckling 1898 tale of smuggling and shipwreck, the answer is a boisterous yes, but readers for whom that evocative title draws a blank need know only this: you’re in for a treat. Its short, salty chapters are crammed with murder, treason and illicit embraces, with chases, battles and perilous high-seas skulduggery. There is international espionage, a whisper of witchcraft, and a cast of orphans, rogues and redcoats. There are, should you still need persuading, maps.Winchelsea takes its title from its East Sussex setting, a crumbling town whose heyday is long passed. It opens there in 1742, when heroine Goody is barely 16 years old. Saved from drowning as a babe, she is the adopted daughter of a French herbalist and one Ezekiel Brown, a local who straddles two worlds, being both physician and – like all Browns before him – “cellarman”, allowing smugglers known as the Mayfield gang to stow their spoils in the maze of tunnels that run from his home, Paradise, down beneath the streets and out to the seashore. Continue reading...