Surgeons' Hall — E.S. Thomson

''Love evocative descriptions of Victorian London and brilliant plotting? Then grab a copy of this!'' Rebecca Griffiths, author of The Primrose Path

What is the secret which grips Corvus Hall?

Visiting the Great Exhibition to view the wax anatomical models of the famous but reclusive Dr Merlin Strangeway, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain find a severed arm, perfectly dissected and laid out amongst the exhibits. Assuming it to be a prank by medical students, they return it to Dr Strangeway, who works at Corvus Hall, a private anatomy school run by Dr James Crowe - one of Edinburgh''s most revered surgeons and teachers of anatomy. Jem''s persistence reveals that a body does indeed lie in the school''s mortuary, minus its right arm. But the body has no provenance. More macabre still, its face has been dissected, making identification impossible. Dr Strangeway denies all knowledge, and Dr Crowe seems unwilling to pursue the matter.

At Corvus Hall, Will is employed to illustrate Dr Crowe''s new anatomy handbook. Soon, it becomes evident that all is not as it should be. Dr Crowe''s daughter, Lilith, visits the mortuary in the dead of night and her twin sisters, Sorrow and Silence - one blind and one deaf - exert a malign influence over the students. Organs, freshly dissected, appear in the anatomy museum. Fear grips lecturers and students, even as something unseen binds them in a bloody pact of silence.

In a mystery that ranges from the wynds of Burke and Hare''s Edinburgh to the dissecting tables of London''s notorious anatomy schools, Jem and Will find that the stakes have never been higher.