Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does...

A hapless gang of crooks, led by pawnbroker Harold Sneed, have managed pull off ‘the big one’: a wages snatch at a factory in Shrewsbury. Two gang members take the money back to Birmingham by train, changing at a station almost on the doorstep of Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall.

It’s there that things start to unravel. The money goes missing. Misunderstanding follows misunderstanding, until it leads the crooks to Batch Hall when everyone is busy with a historical re-enactment show. Among the replica firearms is a real gun, carried by Harold Sneed with murderous intent and Humphrey in mind.

Sneed is now convinced that Humphrey – an overweight former short-order cook from the Bronx – is a Mafia mobster lying low. And on top of this, he believes Humph has his money; as a result, the spectators at Batch Hall are in for more of a show than they bargained for…

Peter Maughan studied at the Actor’s Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland (in the heyday of Ardmore Studios). He founded and ran a fringe theatre in Barnes, London and, living on a converted Thames sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway, wrote pilot film scripts as a freelance deep in the green shades of rural Kent. He lives in a river valley in the Welsh Marches where he writes the Batch Magna novels. Visit Peter's website at http://www.batchmagna.com