A conspiracy of paper Book

The level of scholarship in this highly entertaining and very well written historical murder mystery is, in my view, on a par with that master of the historical genre, Peter Ackroyd. Given the potential dryness of the subject matter (the birth of the stock exchange as we know it and the first crash - the so-called South Sea Bubble) it is extraordinarily enjoyable.

Benjamin Weaver (ne Lienzo) is a Londoner with a colourful past who now earns his living as a thief-taker in 18th century London (in those days there was not yet an established police force). His services are engaged by one William Balfour who believes that his father's so-called self-murder was nothing of the sort and that, moreover, it was closely connected with the death of Weaver's own father, also suspected to be down to foul play. Although Weaver has been estranged from his family for the better part of a decade, he is nonetheless persuaded to conduct an investigation into the matter with little more to go on other than that the two deceased gentlemen's estates were far smaller than they ought to have been and the close timing of their respective deaths.

Given the current global financial travails and their intimate relationship with banks and the stock market, the issues which arise from this work are highly relevant. What or whom we should believe and how much of our financial dealings are fiction are suspicions which the ordinary person has been wondering about ever since the crash and so-called credit crunch. The wheeler-dealing, bluffs and double bluffs, intrigue and so on of today's stockmarket was evidently there from its murky beginnings in Change Alley outlined in this brilliantly writen novel.

The South Sea Company and the Bank of England were at the time vying for the chance to broker Government loans and thus earn themselves a great deal of business and profit. It emerges that forgeries of South Sea stocks have been created, a fact discovered by Weaver's father which is what had cost him his life. These forgeries are somehow connected to the elusive and mysterious Martin Rochester. But who is he really and how might they be connected to the murders?

Adroitly plotted, beautifully written and with a cast of fabulously colourful characters, A Conspiracy of Paper is a superb novel. It is difficult to believe it was Liss's first and I look forward to discovering the rest of his work.