Rose Welford, the wife of a bootmaker, is smothered in her bed in the summer of 1828. Her husband quickly confesses to the crime, claiming that a message from beyond the grave told him to do it. At ever more popular gatherings in fields, factories and fine houses, a charismatic preacher with a history of religious offences seems to be at the heart of it all ? but who, and what, can be believed when fortunes are at stake?

In this fifth novel in the series, Constable Sam Plank is drawn into matters beyond his understanding when his wife Martha hears a message of her own and his junior constable Wilson makes a momentous choice.

I have been in love with words ever since I realised, at age three, that those squiggles on the page actually meant something. I edited the school newspaper (is here the place to confess that I was also the author of the section giving all the gossip on who was going out with whom?) and did lots more reading and writing at university (where, of course, I studied English).

For twenty-five years I ran my own anti-money laundering consultancy, which gave me almost limitless opportunity to write about my very favourite subject: money laundering. And the obsession with understanding the mechanics and motivations of financial crime has only grown.

I have spent years haunting the streets of Regency London, in the company of magistrates' constable Sam Plank. He is the narrator of my series of historical financial crime novels set in consecutive years in the 1820s - just before Victoria came to the throne, and in the policing period after the Bow Street Runners and before the Metropolitan Police.

The fourth Sam Plank novel - "Portraits of Pretence" - was given the "Book of the Year 2017" award by influential book review website Discovering Diamonds. And the fifth - "Faith, Hope and Trickery" - was shortlisted for the Selfies Award 2019.

And I am now researching the first in a new series set in Cambridge in the 1820s, narrated by a university constable called Gregory Hardiman.