Will Starling by Ian Weir

Will Starling: A Novel by Ian Weir --- 473 pages.

Will Starling, "Your Wery 'Umble" narrator, is an orphan much like the Artful Dodger in Dicken's Oliver Twist, adrift in a chancy, dangerous world and forced to live by his not inconsiderable wits.

It is 1816, and the long Napoleonic wars are over. Will arrives back in London, having spent the last five years with the Army, working as an assistant to military surgeon Alex Comrie. Now he is helping Comrie in his efforts to set up a private practice in Cripplegate, one of London's less savory neighborhoods.

Since the war, surgeons, once despised as little more than butchers, are eager to establish themselves as respected medical professionals. There is a College of Surgeons, as well as private anatomy schools, where students may attend lectures, observe surgical procedures, and practice technique by conducting dissections. The law grants the College of Surgeons the right to claim the corpses of four executed murderers per year for scientific study, but the demand is much greater than that. As a result, grave robbers or “resurrectionists” fill the gap in the supply of  fresh cadavers.

Dionysus Atherton, an ambitious young surgeon, doesn't just rely on the Resurrection Men. He makes his own arrangements to obtain cadavers that meet his exacting specifications. He insists that he is acting for the advancement of knowledge and the relief of suffering, but Mr. Comrie considers he is much more interested in the advancement of Dionysus Atherton. But Will suspects that Atherton is engaged in something even worse --- experiments on the living and attempts to bring back the dead.

A darkly comic and dreadfully fascinating tale by this award-winning Canadian playwright, screenwriter and novelist. Weir is also the author of Daniel O'Thunder, named one of the best historical novels of 2011.

Click HERE to visit the author's web site.

Click HERE for a review of Will Starling in the Canadian National Post.

Click HERE for a review in the Vancouver Sun.

Resurrectionist by James McGee

Resurrectionist: A Regency Crime Thriller by James McGee --- 472 pages

Volume 2 in McGee's series featuring Bow Street Runner Matthew Harwood takes a look at the seamy side of medical science in early nineteenth century London. The attempt to organize medical schools and regularize the training of doctors and surgeons, in some part brought about the by urgent demand for medical officers to treat those injured in the wars with Napoleon, is based on new scientific methods. But old fears and prejudices die hard, and in particular, dissection of human corpses to discover how the body works, is still considered a desecration of the dead by the church and the law and the general public. As a result, "Resurrection men" ply their trade in the dark, with dead bodies snatched from their graves and sold to medical schools and individual researchers, who don't ask questions about their sources of supply. The demand is so great, and the money so good, that rival gangs are fighting to control the trade.

Matthew Hawkwood is called out to investigate when the rivalry takes a grim turn. A grave robber is found murdered and his mutilated body hung from a tree in a churchyard as a warning to other gangs. The hunt for the killers takes Hawkwood into the worst slums of London, where life is cheap, the strong prey on the weak, and only the brutal survive. But even worse is in store, when Hawkwood connects the graveyard gangs to an even more bizarre murderer escaped from Bedlam, London's notorious asylum for the insane: a mad genius obsessed with the idea of harvestng organs from the dead to save lives.



 

The Crypt Thief by Mark Pryor

The Crypt Thief: A Hugo Marston Novel by Mark Pryor --- 253 pages

Hugo Marston, a former FBI profiler, now the head of security for the American Embassy in Paris, and his old friend Tom, a hard living more-or-less ex-CIA agent still on retainer, are called into action to assist the French police when the son of a U.S. Senator and his girl friend are found murdered near Jim Morrison's grave in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Even when the walled cemetery is put under intense surveillance, the unknown killer manages to return unseen, break into the crypt of a legendary Moulin Rouge dancer, and disappear again along with half of her skeleton. When it turns out that the murdered girl friend entered France on a faked passport in the company of a reputed Pakistani terrorist, the investigating forces begin looking at the crime as a possible terrorist plot --- but Hugo doesn't think so. Then the killer breaks into another cemetery and steals the bones of another famous Moulin Rouge dancer --- again, right under the noses of the police. How is the killer getting past the police? And why is he fixated on the bones of dead can-can dancers?

With timely assistance from a French police capitaine and Claudia, a reporter with whom he has an on-again, off-again relationship, Hugo finally begins to figure out what motivates these bizarre crimes. But can he manage to get one step ahead of this clever killer and stop his deadly obsession?

Sequel to The Bookseller. The author is a former British reporter, now an assistant district attorney for Travis County TX. Pryor is the creator of the true-crime blog, D.A. Confidential. http://www.daconfidential.com He lives in Austin.