ROCAMBOLE IN PRISON

The Grey Man is behind bars. His people are not.

Rocambole sits in a cell at Newgate, held under a name that is not his own, waiting for a rope. Scotland Yard believes it has finally caged the most dangerous man in Europe. It has not counted on the small army he left outside.

From a garret in Paris to the fog of the London docks, Marmouset takes up the master's work: Milon with his ox-like fists, Vanda the beautiful Russian, faithful Shocking and a band of reformed rogues who would walk into hell on a word from the Grey Man. Their enemies are the Fenian turncoat Sir James Wood and a conspiracy that wants Miss Ellen dead and her fortune buried. Their weapons are disguise, nerve and a stolen map.

Because there is a way into Newgate that no living man remembers - a forgotten network of tunnels running beneath Old Bailey, choked with rubble and two centuries of silence. Marmouset means to dig his way to the master's cell, and he has days, not weeks.

Rocambole in Prison is the twenty-sixth volume of the saga that gave the French language the word rocambolesque - "wildly, gloriously improbable." First serialized in Paris in 1857, the Rocambole novels were the blockbuster thrillers of nineteenth-century Europe, read by millions, and the direct ancestor of every gentleman-criminal from Arsène Lupin to the modern heist thriller.

Now in fresh, modern English - most of it never published in English before.

Sofia E.V. Hamett's translation keeps every twist, character and event of the original, but renders it in the natural prose of a contemporary thriller instead of the clipped telegram-style of the serial page. Nothing has been abridged.

The story continues directly in The Hangman's Rope.