A mesmerizing forensic thriller that thrusts the reader
into the operating rooms, drawing rooms, and back alleys
of 1889 Philadelphia, as a young doctor grapples with the
principles of scientific process to track a daring
killerIn the morgue of a Philadelphia hospital, a
group of physicians open a coffin and uncover the corpse
of a beautiful young woman. What they see takes their
breath away. Within days, one of them strongly suspects
that he knows the woman’s identity…and the horrifying
events that led to her death. But in this richly
atmospheric novel–an ingenious blend of history, suspense
and early forensic science–the most compelling chapter is
yet to come, as young Ephraim Carroll is plunged into a
maze of murder, secrets and unimaginable
crimes....Dr. Ephraim Carroll came to Philadelphia
to study with a leading professor, the brilliant William
Osler, believing that he would gain the power to save
countless lives. As America hurtles toward a new century,
medicine is changing rapidly, in part due to the
legalization of autopsy–a crime only a few years before.
But Carroll and his mentor are at odds over what they
glimpsed that morning in the hospital’s Dead House. And
when a second mysterious death is determined to have been
a ruthless murder, Carroll can feel the darkness gathering
around him–and he ignites an investigation of his
own.Soon he is moving between the realm of elite
medicine, Philadelphia high society, and a teeming
badlands of criminality and sexual depravity along the
city’s fetid waterfront. With a wealthy, seductive woman
clouding his vision, the controversial artist Thomas
Eakins sowing scandal, and the secrets of the nation’s
powerful surgeons unraveling around him, Carroll is forced
to confront an agonizing moral choice–between exposing a
killer, undoing a wrong, and, quite possibly, protecting
the future of medicine itself….