While draining a pond during work for the construction of the Stockton to Darlington Railway George Stevenson's workers discover a female corpse with a dagger stuck between her ribs - could it be that of Lady Beresford, the French wife of a local baron who disappeared under mysterious circumstances twenty years ago? The identity of the victim is at the heart of Jean-Pierre Ohl's novel, a richly woven tapestry set during the rise of capitalism in England. The Devil's Road has a Dickensian range of characters from the indolent liberal lawyer with a taste for Byron's poems and madeira wine, his imperturbable clerk Snegg, the activist worker Davies and the 'Corporal', a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and demonstrator wounded at the Peterloo Massacre - there is even a role for the young Charles Dickens working in the blacking warehouse. As well as its vivid picture of English society at a key moment of development, The Devil's Road also has elements of the Gothic novel, making it Jean-Pierre Ohl's homage to the English tradition of fiction. AUTHOR: Jean-Pierre Ohl is a bookseller in Talence near Bordeaux. He is the author of two novels Mr Dick or The Tenth Book and The Lairds of Cromarty, both published in England by Dedalus.