June 5, 2026 · By Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell is best known for his sweeping multi-volume series — the long march of Sharpe through the Napoleonic wars, the Viking-age saga of The Last Kingdom — but Gallows Thief is one of his rare standalone novels, and its relative brevity makes its virtues all the more concentrated. Set in the moral squalor of Regency London, it is a mystery that doubles as an indictment: a story about a society so in love with its own procedures of punishment that it has lost any serious interest in justice.
The premise is propulsive. Rider Sandman, a decorated veteran of Waterloo and the Peninsular War, is engaged by the Home Secretary to investigate a condemned man’s conviction before the hangman does his work. The accused is Charles Corday, a young artist sentenced to death for the murder of a countess, and the evidence against him, on closer inspection, is considerably less conclusive than the court seemed to care. Sandman is not a natural investigator — he is a soldier, accustomed to orders and clarity — and the murky world of buyable witnesses and officials who would rather see an innocent man hang than have a convenient verdict unpicked is deeply uncongenial to him. His reluctance makes him more interesting than any amount of professional eagerness would. He is a man of rigid honor operating in a world that has little use for it, and the friction between the two is the engine of the novel.
What gives Sandman additional texture is the weight he carries before the investigation begins. His family’s name and fortune have been destroyed by his father’s financial recklessness, leaving him a gentleman in title only — unable to afford the life his station implies, and unable to pursue the love story that runs alongside the central mystery, complicated at every turn by a status-obsessed society that treats poverty as a moral failing. He is honorable, occasionally bad-tempered, and almost entirely unsuited to the patience detection requires. Which is, of course, exactly what makes him so readable.
Cornwell’s London is pungently realized — not the romanticized Regency of drawing-room fiction, but a city of noise, crowds, and casual cruelty, where Newgate Prison looms as a monument to a justice system that is theatrical in its severity and indifferent to truth. The novel opens inside its walls, and Cornwell wastes no time: “Sir Henry Forrest, banker and alderman of the city of London, almost gagged when he entered the Press Yard, for the smell was terrible, worse than the reek of the sewer outflows where the Fleet Ditch oozed into the Thames. It was a stink from the cesspits of hell, an eye-watering stench that took a man’s breath away.” The setting never lets up.
His characterization is precise and often darkly comic. A housekeeper who tries to obstruct Sandman’s inquiries is dispatched in a single sentence: “She had white hair pulled hard back into a bun and a harsh face with a hooked nose curving toward a sharp chin. A nutcracker face, Sandman thought, and one utterly bereft of any signs of human kindness.” That “nutcracker face” is Cornwell in a single stroke — functional, vivid, faintly merciless.
The novel’s emotional center arrives in a visit to Corday in the condemned hold, and it is handled with quiet devastation. “‘You said the Home Secretary wanted you to make inquiries. So will you?’ Corday’s gaze was challenging, then he crumpled. ‘You don’t care. No one cares!’ — ‘I shall make inquiries,’ Sandman said gruffly, and suddenly he could not take the stench and the tears and the misery anymore and so he turned and ran down the stairs.” That flight — gruff promise followed by the instinct to escape — tells us everything: the decency that won’t let him look away, and the humanity that can barely stand to.
Jonathan Keeble, also excellent in the Warlord Chronicles, proves equally at home in Regency London. His narration brings an ironic, dry-eyed quality to Cornwell’s portrait of the era’s judicial rituals — the performative gravity of men who profit from punishment — that underscores the novel’s moral anger without ever becoming didactic. Keeble’s feel for Cornwell’s pacing and his flair for colorful characterization remain as sure as ever.
Gallows Thief is the kind of novel that leaves you wishing Cornwell had returned to Sandman — for a second story, and a third. As a standalone it is complete and satisfying; as a world, it feels as though it has barely been opened. That is perhaps the highest compliment you can pay a character: one book is not enough.
