An old, unsolved murder hangs over the Maypole Inn on the edge of Epping Forest. Its threads draw in Gabriel Varden, the cheerful locksmith of Clerkenwell, his scheming apprentice Sim Tappertit, and simple-minded Barnaby with his raven Grip, until all of them are swept into the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots that set London burning in 1780.
Dickens’s first historical novel, with crowd scenes that look ahead to A Tale of Two Cities and the raven that inspired Poe. Download the free EPUB.