London, 1718, and in the Rookery, one of the darkest places in the city, a family lies butchered. Even their young children are dead, and someone watches, knowing that his work is far from over.

The Thieftaker General, Jonathan Wild, is the one person who seems to care about what happened, which raises the interest of Colonel Nathaniel Charters and his operative Jonas Flynt. But Charters has seen something of this before – can a ghost from his past have returned to haunt him?

As Flynt hunts both foreign agents and threats from the streets, it becomes a question of who he can trust? And who wants nothing more than to see his blood turn the streets red?

Blimey, is this series on book 4 already? It only seems yesterday that Jonas Flynt, one of the more interesting protagonists that I’ve come across in the past few years, was heading up to Scotland to sort out threats to the country and his family. Now he seems settled in London with the former courtesan Belle, although his inability to be honest about himself seems to be destined to cause problems there.

I’ve mentioned before that this series is more like a thriller than a whodunnit. While this does have the question about whether the killer is the same person who did it in the past, the core question here is who is orchestrating matters and why.

While as I say this is more thriller than whodunit, there is more that a whiff of soap opera about things here – the final pages could have come out of an episode of Regency Eastenders.

I only say that so the reader knows what to expect, not to put people off. This era of history is one that most people know little about – in a UK school, you’d probably skip straight from Restoration to Queen Victoria – and Skelton does an excellent job of bringing it to life. The characters, both major and minor, are vividly and convincingly drawn and the story threads slowly knit together into an effective finale. As ever, the events evolve Flynt’s character in interesting ways. In some ways, I was a little disappointed with the final page, as I was hoping to see a more settled Flynt in the next book. But where would the drama be there?

A Thief’s Blood is out now from Canelo. Many thanks for the review copy.