by Martin Cruz Smith
In this engrossing novel of 19th-century England, Jonathan Blair is a famous mining engineer-adventurer who has been run out of Africa for allegedly stealing from a missionary Bible fund. Blair is anxious to get back to the Gold Coast. But he lacks the means until his sometime patron Bishop Hannay offers to foot an expedition. All Blair has to do in return is go up to Wigan in the Lancashire coal-mining country and find John Maypole, the young curate who is engaged to the bishop's daughter Charlotte and who has mysteriously disappeared.
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