JIM Stringer, train driver and amateur sleuth, is back. But this time, the hero of York-born author Andrew Martin's series of railway mysteries is an official railway detective.

It is winter, 1906. At York station, the gas lamps are all lit. Outside, the rain falls relentlessly on the city's ancient, cobbled streets. Inside, crowds of people scurry along the platforms, desperate to get home to their supper, while a goods train belches in in a cloud of steam, heat and smoke.

It is Jim's first day as a railway detective, and he's none too happy. His new job means he won't be able to drive his beloved steam engines any more. There's also that headline in the Yorkshire Evening Press: Hotel Porter Found with his Throat Cut. No doubt a job for the railway police, he thinks glumly.

And then he meets the station's Lost Luggage Porter humblest among the railway employees and his problems really begin.

Andrew's latest Jim Stringer adventure is all that fans of books like The Necropolis Railway and The Blackpool Highflyer have come to expect. Wonderful, Dickensian descriptions not least, as you'd expect of the son of a York railwayman, of the trains themselves: hissing, clanking, belching giants that have a life and character all their own. The streets of old York come to life too, as Jim's investigations take him into the rougher parts of town.

Then there are the characters. From the telegraph boy who greets Jim with a "Blimey!" on the footbridge at York railway station in the opening pages to the assortment of pickpockets, station loungers' and other small fry of the York underworld he meets during the course of his investigation, they are all satisfyingly real and rounded.

A treat.