The Cuckoo's Nest (A Victorian Murder Mystery)

A thrilling blend of mystery and history from the last decade of the nineteenth century, The Cuckoo’s Nest is set among the hills and valleys of remote Mid Wales at a time of profound change and unrest.

It is the hot, sultry summer of 1896. A man has been murdered, one of the thousands of Irish navvies helping to build the great chain of dams that would create a reservoir out of the Elan Valley in Radnorshire and provide clean drinking water for the crowded city of Birmingham. But the man carried a secret, and now Detective Sergeant Thomas Jones is sent from London to investigate.

As he delves deeper into the heart of the mystery Jones uncovers a trail of corruption and embezzlement, and passions deep as a mountain stream. His search for the truth takes him high into the mountains and out to the astonishing shanty town where the army of navvies live and work, to the vast building site where the dams are being built, and inside the local workhouse; and to the Cuckoo’s Nest itself, the dark and mysterious hollow where the man was killed.

Marking a change from Gordon Reid’s previous fantasy novels, The Cuckoo’s Nest is a straight historical murder mystery overlaid on the real story of the construction of one of the wonders of the Victorian age, the mighty Elan Valley dams (the author was County Archivist of Powys for twelve years).

They say the past is a foreign country—in this case, it’s Mid Wales….