Twelve London thrillers · the first Thomas Ludlow title
Twelve ways the city can turn on you
Whitechapel to Wimbledon, the Blitz to three in the morning on the Isle of Dogs. Twelve standalone stories, each one finished in the time it takes to get home.
Twelve ways the city can turn on you.
A Whitechapel minicab driver is handed a silent, terrified child and given one night to outrun the men who already have his number plate. A Wimbledon solicitor opens an anonymous message and watches the tidy account of her own past come apart. A drowning City trader accepts a stranger's impossible gift — at the price of one name, every quarter. A mild Enfield widow has spent a patient decade tending the allotment beside the charming man who killed her son.
From a stalled Tube train in the dark near Cockfosters to a Blitz shelter waiting for a single bomb, from a haunted Highgate parlour in 1884 to a council flat on the Isle of Dogs that fills with light at three in the morning, these twelve standalone stories map a London you won't find on any board outside a station.
Riveting, varied, and unafraid of the dark.
The twelve stories
The Long Fare
A Whitechapel minicab driver has one night and one tank of fuel to get a silent, terrified child somewhere safe — and the men hunting her already have his plate.
Old Girls
A name Eleanor Fenwick has not heard in twenty years arrives as a friend request. Then a group chat she never asked to join, and a photograph of four girls in the summer they were sixteen.
The Escalator
A Dagenham boy claws his way up the City — until the price of the ride comes due, one name at a time.
Good Neighbour
A man moves into the flat below, and Lia learns his tread on the stairs, then his hours, then the days his curtains close when he cannot be home. Then the notes start.
The Wrong Bag
A divorced middle-manager picks up the wrong holdall at King's Cross — and spends one accelerating night across London discovering exactly what he's willing to do to keep it.
The Lying-In
Highgate, 1884. Alice Sowerby takes a position as companion to a widow in deep mourning, in a house kept dark, with one rule: never the room at the end of the second floor.
Tilt
A man with a wife, a mortgage and a baby on the way is one win away from fixing everything — and has been for some time.
The Allotment
A widow has tended the same plot beside the same charming man for nine years — and only one of them knows why.
All Clear
One night of the Blitz, five strangers, one shelter — and a city that decides who walks home.
Signal Failure
Stalled in the dark between the last two stations, a carriage of strangers decides someone is to blame.
The Cartographer
He chooses people London has already agreed not to see. When they are found, no one comes forward, and no one can put a name to them. Detective Sergeant Calder intends to.
The Light in Cubitt Town
An old man on the Isle of Dogs watches a dead flat fill with light at three in the morning, and the council swears nobody lives there.
Twelve standalone stories
One at a time, on the way home
Nothing here needs to be read in order, and none of it runs longer than a journey across town. Start at Whitechapel or start at Cubitt Town; the city is the same either way.
Mind the Dark: Twelve London Thrillers