IT is freezing mid-winter, 1909. A train hits a snowdrift on a lonely stretch of line running along the clifftops between Whitby and Middlesbrough. In the process of clearing the line, a body is discovered.

So begins York railway detective Jim Stringer's most dangerous case yet.

The body turns out to be that of a young man - a photographer for a railway magazine.

But who has killed him? And, more perplexingly, what has happened to the club carriage of wealthy industrialists he was photographing? All have mysteriously vanished.

Jim is determined to find out - not least because he's in danger of the sack. But as he gets closer and closer to the truth, the hunter becomes the hunted - and Jim finds that he's fighting not only for his job, but also his life.

Murder At Deviation Junction is the fourth in York-born author Andrew Martin's series of crime novels about the grumpy railway sleuth.

It is, in the writer's words, a real John Buchan of a book.

Jim's investigations take him from the mighty blast-furnaces of Middlesbrough's Edwardian steel quarter, Ironopolis, to York and London - and then on a sweeping train journey north to the snowbound highlands of Scotland.

There, just like Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps, Jim finds himself on the run - through a landscape of snowbound mountains.

Andrew, who grew up in York and whose dad worked for 40 years on the railways, admits he has always been a fan of Buchan.

But he has was disappointed by the great train journey at the heart of The 39 Steps.

Hannay boards a train at St Pancras in London, and just one paragraph later he's in Scotland.

The Hitchcock film made a little more of that journey. But as a self-confessed train buff, Andrew has always wanted to give it the attention it deserves.

Jim's journey on the overnight sleeper to Scotland takes a lot more than one paragraph. It is full of nostalgia for the great days of the train: rattling compartments, lamp-lit stations looming out of the night, tea-wagons on platforms serving eager passengers through pulled-down compartment windows.

But Murder At Deviation Junction is just as much a book about snow, Andrew says. Jim seems to make a habit of stepping off platforms into whirling blizzards - and there is also that epic chase through the snowy highlands. "I have a nostalgia for snow," says Andrew. "And 1909 was a bad winter!"

What also stands out in this fourth book, however, is the nightmarish landscape of the Middlesbrough ironworks. Andrew, with his love of huge, clanking, steam-powered engines, has a field day with the white-hot blast furnaces and the tiny coal trains that supply them. How about this for a description: "A bloke came at me from the darkness. Look out, mister,' he said, indicating behind. I turned around and a great ladle of molten iron was rattling towards me, suspended from a moving crane. I tore my eyes away directly, for the sight burnt them. I stood aside as the ladle passed. It was like a piece of the sun put into a bucket, and it was approaching the great swivelling head, which was turning again, ready to receive its drink of hot iron."

Great stuff. And with Jim older, more cynical and more desperate than ever, Murder At Deviation Junction makes for a rollicking adventure novel Buchan himself might have been proud of.

  • Murder At Deviation Junction by Andrew Martin is published by faber and faber on June 7, priced £10.99