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|title=The Scent of Death

|sort=Scent of Death, The

|publisher=HarperCollins

|date=February 2013

|website=http://www.andrew-taylor.co.uk/

|summary=A chilling and fascinating historical thriller set in a New York in the grip of the War of Independence, Andrew Taylor’s latest revels in the darker side of humanity.

}}

It’s hard to explain why Andrew Taylor’s novels are so chilling. They’re ghost stories that often lack ghosts, crime novels in which the crime itself feels at a remove from the rest of the action. But that’s really the secret of their power: while in most thrillers, the bogeyman is a single entity, easy to pinpoint and therefore easy to excise from the rest of the healthy fictional world, things are never so simple in the universes Taylor creates. What is frightening in an Andrew Taylor novel? Everything.

This isn’t a book that gives you someone to root for – on the contrary it’s entirely unpleasant, peopled by villains and rogues. Despite your best intentions, though, it twists you up deeper and deeper into the coils of its sometimes slow but always darkly fascinating plot. Taylor has a beautiful eye for historical colour and a pitch-perfect ear for accurate turn of phrase. His 1778 New York leaps to life in a way that feels effortlessly right. From the first page you can tell that you’re in the hands of a master of the genre. ''The Scent of Death'' is a slow burner rather than a relentless page-turner, and I’m not sure it’s as fantastically successful as its sister novel ''The American Boy'', but it is still a beautifully executed and engrossing historical thriller from a writer very much on top of his game.

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