Thresher

A rural community in West Dorset is hit by a chain of troubles. Fires are set, machinery is destroyed, and a family is pushed toward ruin by a crippling debt incurred through gambling. Goods and land are stolen, and a forced seizure of property leaves people without what they depended on. Bitter rivalry breaks out between neighbours, and livestock is mutilated. Beneath it all runs a secret love affair, while the landowning family at the centre of the story faces an enemy nobody can identify.

The family must uncover who is behind these attacks before the losses cost them their livelihood and, ultimately, their lives. The threat is not only to their property but to their survival, and every new misfortune makes the search more urgent.

The novel is set in early nineteenth-century England, in the period just after the Napoleonic Wars ended. Its setting, on the cusp of a turbulent era, looks ahead to the upheavals that would follow.