The Chronicles of Snouty Thompson, Deceased
It's the Year of Our Lord 1796. Thirteen-year-old Snouty Thompson has turned his back on his father's blacksmith trade and is leaving the village of his birth. He wants to swap the tedium of village life for fame and adventure as a drummer boy in the British Army. But barely has he smuggled himself aboard an empty mail coach to York, parked up at the White Hart Inn, when the horses bolt and the coach crashes. He is catapulted off.
Snouty emerges confused, from the wreckage, and annoyed to find people seem oblivious to him. It's only when he is approached by Death's Coachman, the fearsome Grimm Reaper, that he discovers why: he is now a ghost. His young life and ambitions are suddenly snuffed out. But are they?
Grimm has come to offer Snouty a ride to the Hereafter, but Snouty refuses to go: he has led such a short and uneventful life, and intends to make up for it in his After-Life!
Grimm is forced to let him stay, but there is a price to pay: Snouty must be tied to the place where he died; haunting only the places he knew in life.
Snouty isn't disappointed. A chance encounter with Jim Hope, a ghost-sensitive young army quartermaster, leads him to a series of adventures which he is later able to share with Lizzie Benson, the half-Jamaican daughter of a foreman railway navvie. In the course of the story, he is quickly drawn into plots hatched first by murderous smugglers and then a ruthless railway builder. Life - after death - takes him across fifty years of history and a changing Victorian landscape, around the village of Claxelby with its White Hart Inn, and even on to the neighbouring City of York.
Throughout these adventures, Snouty is shadowed, and helped, by Death's Coachman. While it had been Grimm's role to persuade Snouty to take that Final Journey, he comes to befriend him. And it is with Grimm's help that Snouty learns the finer skills of haunting. And with the help of Lizzie and James - and Grimm Reaper, that he overcomes threats from a cast of Dickensian villains, realising the dreams of companionship and fulfilment that had eluded him in life. But not before some terrifying ghostly standoffs.
