An excerpt from In Leicester Fields by Ross Gilfillan

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My guest today is Ross Gilfillan, author of In Leicester Fields, which was published on 26th September 2025. It’s available to purchase now in paperbook or as an ebook.

Set in 18th century London, In Leicester Fields is described as ‘a darkly compelling tale of guilt, corruption, and the terrible price of art’ and promises to immerse the reader in ‘a boisterous London of Hogarthian crowds, buzzing coffee houses, Grub Street newspapers and public executions’. I don’t know about you, but as a fan of historical fiction, I have to say that sounds rather enticing.

Below is an excerpt from In Leicester Fields to further whet your appetite.

About the Book

London, 1783. Dying artist Henry Grace seeks redemption for unspeakable crimes committed with a secret society, but his act of atonement threatens the city’s most powerful men.

When fiery female apprentice Michel Angelo and Grub Street journalist Morris “Mouse” Malone investigate Grace’s final masterpiece, they are drawn into a world of scandal, opium and murder that stretches from the stark wards of the Foundling Hospital to the artists’ salons of Paris and Venice.

Find In Leicester Fields on Goodreads

Excerpt from In Leicester Fields by Ross Gilfillan

Golden Square, Mayfair.  From where he perches atop his hemp-bound tower of creaking, wooden scaffolding, he is lord of London. 

He lays down his trowel upon the newest-laid course of small, yellow bricks, pops a broken, clay pipe unlit between thick, brown lips, and surveys the city, “Made glorious,” he loudly declaims across the tranquil square, “By this pink God’s summer sunshine!” 

Golden Square is wonderfully quiet, he thinks, a continent apart from the crowded court where he sleeps, when God wills it, with his wife and four children. 

Fifty feet below, the sounds from the street, the chivying of shovel on stone as mortar is mixed, and the complaining of iron-bound cart wheels on new-laid road, are muted by altitude and his own happy distraction. 

He arcs his south-easterly gaze from somewhere in the direction of the gardens of Burlington House, over a wilderness of brick and smoking chimney pots towards Covent Garden, that magical place where last night he surrendered himself and a full week’s wage to the fragile embrace and juniper breath of a virgin child no more than eleven years old, they had assured him. 

It’s not been a day since that happened, but already he feels better, so much improved. It is, as he said to Pissing Billy that very morning, like two full hods of Essex bricks had been lifted clean from his shoulders. 

 Now someone is calling from the street below. It’s not Billy – he’s off to find a place to piss again – but the pretty girl with the unmarked face who sells milk from the beast she drives before her with a switch. 

“Milk, milko, warm from the cow, milk a half-penny a pint,” she’s calling. She looks country-fresh and young, someone a man might spend a night with and not pay the awful price. 

And now there’s the rattle of a bunch of keys and the scrape of a heavy door opening. A kitchen maid in a bright white bonnet, clutching a jug and hitching her skirts, pops up from down in the area of the house next door. 

The milkmaid unstraps her stool and gets to work, talking to her customer all the time, balls of shrill laughter bouncing across the empty square and one or two unfettered words rising to the rooftops.

Now, as if called on stage for his amusement, come the chairmen again, turning into Golden Square, as they have at this time for five Thursdays past, the big, ox-faced one at the front huffing and cursing and a damn to the fines and behind, the other one whose face is hidden by an oversized hat from which sprouts the cue of a grey wig.

The big one offers a loud profanity as he sees not only the cow and two heedless women but three men who are unloading stacks of slates from a carrier’s cart. Like two flatirons with a box between them, the men in the dark hats snake and dog-leg around and between the obstacles in their way, the chair swinging wildly, the chairman cursing and whoever is inside holding on, no doubt, for sweet life. 

The builder chuckles and his broad, white smile follows them as they progress quickly down the road until they turn, a little too sharply, onto Brewers Street and are lost to sight. 

About the Author

Ross Gilfillan is an established literary novelist and former Daily Mail book reviewer (1998–2009). The Snake-Oil Dickens Man was 4th Estate’s lead fiction title at the Frankfurt Book Fair and sold at auction. His second novel, The Edge of the Crowd, was runner-up for the Encore Award for Best Second Novel. After completing a non-fiction title, Crime and Punishment in Victorian London, and debuting in crime fiction with The Capo’s Daughter (Rampart Books, 2025) under his pseudonym J.R. Fillan, Gilfillan now returns to his roots in literary historical fiction with the devastating In Leicester Fields.

Connect with Ross
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#WWWWednesday – 22nd October 2025

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Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain and The Assassin of Verona from my TBR pile and listening to the audiobook of Swan Song, also from my TBR pile.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie (Bloomsbury)

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich.

Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic.

Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-­three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so.

The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything.

The Assassin of Verona by Benet Brandreth (Zaffre)

Venice, 1586. William Shakespeare is disguised as a steward to the English Ambassador. He and his friends Oldcastle and Hemminges possess a deadly secret: the names of the catholic spies in England who seek to destroy Queen Elizabeth. Before long the Pope’s agents will begin to close in on them and fleeing the city will be the players’ only option.

In Verona, Aemelia, the daughter of a Duke, is struggling to conceal her passionate affair with her cousin Valentine. But darker times lie ahead with the arrival of the sinister Father Thornhill who is determined to seek out any who don’t conform to the Pope’s ruthless agenda . . .

Events will converge in the forests around Verona as a multitude of plots are hatched and discovered, players fall in and out of love and disguises are adopted and then discarded. Will Shakespeare and his friends escape with their secrets – and their lives?

Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott (Windmill)

To the outside world, they were the icons of high society – the most glamorous and influential women of their age. To Truman Capote they were his Swans: the ideal heroines, as vulnerable as they were powerful. They trusted him with their most guarded, martini-soaked secrets, each believing she was more special and loved than the next…

Until he betrayed them.

What I’ve Just Read

Mrs Finnegan’s Guide to Life, Love and Laxatives by Bridget Whelan (The Regency Town House)

Transcription by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.

Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. (Review to follow)

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey (Atlantic)

1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.

Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another’s sight, always on one another’s mind, yet rarely together.

Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she’s ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives. (Review to follow)

A Pretender’s Murder by Christopher Huang (Inkshares)

Few have given more for the Empire than Colonel Hadrian Russell. Robbed of his four sons by the Great War, he now holds court as the acting president of the Britannia, a prestigious soldiers-only club in London. But when the Colonel is shot and thrown out the club’s front window, it seems the shadows of the Great War may extend further than previously thought.

Lieutenant Eric Peterkin, newly installed secretary at the Britannia, finds himself thrust into the role of detective after Scotland Yard points fingers at friends he knows are innocent. But is the true murderer an unknown spy? Or a recently resurfaced friend of the Colonel’s dead sons? Or is it one of the Colonel’s four widowed daughters-in-law, who by all appearances paid him complete devotion?

Accusations from personal betrayal to wartime espionage mount among the suspects as Eric’s investigation draws him back to scenes and sites of a war he’s sought to leave behind. From the greening fields of Flanders and the springtime streets of Paris to the sterile wards of a Swiss sanatorium, and back to the Britannia itself, Eric finds that even myths leave behind bones. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

When a young man’s girlfriend vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the city, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.