Murder at Old St. Thomas's

Lane's prose is layered immersive and immediately transports readers to nineteenth century London.-- BookLife Prize. In 1862 London the body of a famous surgeon is found sitting upright in an old operating theatre. His dead eyes stare at the table at the center of the room where patients had screamed and cried as medical students looked on. The bookish Inspector Slaughter must discover the killer with the help of his American sergeant Mark Honeycutt and clues from Nightingale nurses surgeon's dressers devious apothecaries and even stage actors. Victorian Southwark becomes the theatre for revealing secrets of the past in a world where anesthesia is new working-class audiences enjoy Shakespeare and women reformers solve society's problems.