This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Borough Treasurer is a thirty-one-chapter mystery by J. S. Fletcher, first published in 1907, set in the Yorkshire manufacturing town of Highmarket. One dark winter night, when the town's business is winding down, an elderly man named Kitely is followed from the streets and struck down and robbed — and the murdered man proves to be no ordinary town character but a former convict whose past quietly reaches into the very heart of Highmarket's government. Within hours the police arrest John Harborough, a workman with a grudge and a record, and the town is content to see him hang.
The case is saved from being that simple by two things: an unknown benefactor who, through the personal column of The Times, sends the young solicitor Gifford Brereton nine hundred pounds to defend Harborough at any cost, and Brereton's own refusal to believe the obvious. As he digs into Kitely's lodgings, his pocket-book and his scrap-book of old fraud cases, Brereton discovers that the old man's murder is the end of a trail thirty years long — a trail that leads to the Wilchester building society, to two young men who once embezzled two thousand pounds and vanished, and to the two most powerful men in Highmarket: the borough treasurer Cotherstone and the mayor Mallalieu, partners in a prosperous business and old friends of Kitely...
