Dr. Adolphus Hatton is a pathologist who deals with the dead on a daily basis. With his assistant, they work to determine causes of death and learn more about the human body. He must also deal with an Inspector from Scotland Yard whose morals are questionable at best.
A series of violent murders whose victims seem to have no connection will draw the Inspector and the professor into an Irish plot designed to cause as much damage as possible. Dr. Hatton will find himself drawn to the the wife of one of the victims as he works to discover the identity of the killers.
Dark, gritty, and very often gruesome in the descriptions of the the autopsies, D.E. Meredith has created an eye-opening series that is the start of the coroner and medical examiner system that we utilize today. We see the chief characters as people with needs,desires and regrets, not just officials that do what it takes to finish the job. Fans of medical mysteries should give THE DEVIL'S RIBBON and the Hatton and Roumande series a try.
A trail of beribboned murders. A ticking bomb. A city about
to explode.
July, 1858: London swelters under the oppressive heat of the
hottest summer on record, and trouble is brewing. Forensic
scientist Professor Adolphus Hatton and his trusty
assistant, Albert Roumande, have a morgue full of cholera
victims. The dead are all Irish, the poorest of Londonβs
poor. They came in their thousands ten years ago, forced
into the London slums by the terrible famine. Now they live
segregated from the rest of Victorian society, a race apart
in this heaving city who are at once everywhere and nowhere.
But they are a close knit people, and deeply politicised.
From the docks in Limehouse to the taverns of St Giles,
Fenian groups are talking of violence and of liberation.
When a series of violent murders threatens to cause tensions
to boil over, Scotland Yard calls on Hatton and Roumande to
help investigate. The seemingly unconnected victims, who
hail from all strata of society, are linked by the same
macabre calling card: a bright Fenian green ribbon placed
strategically about their corpses. While Hattonβs search
for clues leads him into the spell of a blindingly beautiful
woman, a widow of one of the slain, rumblings of a bombing
campaign led by an agitator priest and his gang of would-be
terrorists build throughout the slums. As the orchestra of
veiled motives, divided loyalties, and violent retribution
reaches a crescendo, Hattonβs skills are tested to the
limit. With Roumande, he must race across London to an
island with a shipwreck and a secret on a nail-biting race
against time in this gripping, elegantly executed
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