The Seeker

Spies, Exiles and Assassins in Cromwell’s London

The Seeker by S.G. MacLean won the CWA’s 2015 Historical Dagger and deservedly so for her fascinating account of the Interregnum. Oliver Cromwell’s London was full of censorship, torture, spies and subterfuge.

Synopsis

The year is 1654, and Oliver Cromwell rules England. The Roundheads have executed Charles I, and English citizens have entered a new era of liberty and equality. Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t match the political dream. Cromwell has taken on the mantel of Lord Protector to undertake “the chief magistracy and the administration of government”. Instead of providing liberty and equality, the Puritans have curtailed many of the freedoms the English enjoyed. Royalists are plotting to overthrow Cromwell, and his former allies are stirring unrest.

Damian Seeker — a Republican Intelligence Officer — finds one of Cromwell’s critics, Elias Ellingworth, in the Palace of Westminster. He is standing over the body of a senior military aide with a blood-stained knife in his hand. Ellingworth is condemned to be tortured and executed in the Tower of London. A simple matter, except the grieving widow swears that her husband was dead long before Ellingworth arrived.

Should Seeker allow Ellingworth to die for the crime, one less enemy of the Republic to worry about? Or should he investigate further lest there is a plot to kill the Lord Protector himself?

Review

S.G. MacLean sets The Seeker in a fascinating period of English history. Political unrest, the printing press and the advent of coffee houses mean plotting and sedition are rife. The Royalists plot against the Government, and the Government spies on its citizens. It was an era when nobody could be sure of the allegiances of their friends or neighbours or who they could trust. The Interregnum was as deceptive, murderous and brutal as the Third Reich that Kerr and Kutscher chose as the setting for their novels. The backdrop provides the perfect stage for a crime novel.

MacLean’s plot keeps you engaged. She layers historical facts — white slavery, assassination plots and opium dependency — with private desires and vendettas, building tension with intrigue and suspense, not blood and gore.

Her depiction of London is atmospheric. If you know the city, you will find it both familiar and forbiddingly alien. The characters, especially the women, are impeccably developed. Though most perplexing of all is the main protagonist, Damien Seeker. It isn’t easy to make a hero out of a man whose stock in trade is espionage, deception, torture and execution. The Seeker is well worth reading if only to discover how MacLean achieves that trick.

Excerpt

Seeker mounted the last flight of stairs leading to the corridor where the Winters had their apartments, alongside those of Cromwell’s other favoured officers and their families. He never felt comfortable in this part of the palace and came to it as seldom as possible. Turning down the corridor he wished he had brought a light with him, for at least half of the candles along the walls had burned down or been snuffed out. The Winters’ lodgings were at the far end, at the top of another flight of stairs and that end of the corridor was almost totally in darkness. Something of Seeker’s old huntsman’s instinct came back to him. There was a prickling of the hairs on his arm, at the back of his neck, as when wounded prey was close somewhere, in the darkness. He slowed his pace a little, looked more deeply into the gloom, listened. He sensed them then: something living and something dead. A man, with his back to him, was standing up slowly, never shifting his attention from the object crumpled on the floor. As Seeker drew closer, Elias Ellingworth at last turned to face him, his open mouth emitting only a strangled moan as the knife in his hand fell to the floor where John Winter lay, collapsed, bloodied, dead.

The Seeker by S.G. MacLean