Raffles (Paperback)

Paperback. A gentleman thief. A forgotten authority. A secret powerful enough to survive two centuries.A.J. Raffles has come to Monaco for pleasure, cricket and, naturally, the occasional opportunity for theft. The last person he expects to encounter is Harry 'Bunny' Manders, his old school companion, now a journalist struggling to keep one step ahead of financial ruin.Their chance reunion soon becomes something far more dangerous.A seemingly insignificant piece of Napoleonic history points towards a secret that has passed from Corsica through generations of bankers, custodians and empires. At its heart lies the Corsican Authority, not a treasure map, but something potentially far more valuable: the power to determine who may control a vast and long-obscured legacy.Others are searching for it.A sophisticated financial network will use violence to possess it. Powerful custodians have spent generations ensuring that nobody does. And somewhere between Monaco, Corsica and Paris lies the final piece of a puzzle that once consumed a private banker and may now prove irresistible to Raffles.With Bunny once again at his side, Raffles must navigate private banks, old archives, high society and the galleries of Paris, culminating in an audacious deception in which the crime everyone sees is not the crime that matters.But when the ultimate prize is finally within his grasp, the greatest challenge may not be stealing it.It may be deciding what a thief should do once he owns it.Raffles: The Corsican Authority is the first novel in a contemporary series bringing E.W. Hornung's celebrated gentleman thief and Harry 'Bunny' Manders into the modern world, combining elegant crime, historical mystery, international intrigue and the enduring friendship at the heart of the original stories.I think this is considerably stronger for Amazon than simply reproducing the back-cover copy. It gives prospective buyers the hook, characters, stakes and genre while withholding the major twists. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…