The Lamb Inn. A Smuggling Thriller on the Sussex Coast - Raymond P. Worsfold

In the nineteenth century, during the age of smuggling, decent men in a Sussex coastal village are driven to desperate measures by exorbitant duties on goods the wealthy are desperate to acquire. Thomas Blackwood has built a sophisticated operation-compartmentalized, resilient, sustainable. Fletcher, a revenue officer, is tasked with shutting it down.

What begins as an adversarial pursuit evolves into something far more complex. Each man proves himself indispensable to the other. Each understands what the other is trying to accomplish. And as they adapt and counter-adapt, playing by rules they come to accept, they discover that survival often requires an accommodation neither officially acknowledges.

Over seven years, an arrangement takes shape-one that serves the network, protects the community, and allows both men to do their duty as they understand it. But the system that created them both has its own logic, and when that logic shifts, even the most carefully constructed arrangement cannot hold.

A novel about the cost of survival, the compromise of principle, and what happens when duty fails.