Body Snatcher of Surgeons' Square
A Gothic Novel of the Anatomy Trade

About this book:

Edinburgh, 1828. The city's anatomy schools are starving for fresh cadavers, and the resurrection men who supply them are growing bolder. Murdoch, a former carpenter turned grave-robber, knows the arithmetic of the trade: eight sovereigns for a clean corpse, ten for a curiosity. But when he and his brutish partner Finch deliver a weaver to Dr. Knox's dissecting rooms, Murdoch spots something the clerk misses—a neat, purple bruise beneath the dead man's jaw, the signature of a thumb pressed hard against a windpipe. The weaver didn't die of fever. He was murdered for the price of his flesh.

In the fog-choked wynds of the Old Town, Murdoch uncovers a horror worse than grave-robbing. The infamous Irishmen Burke and Hare aren't digging up the dead—they're making them, suffocating lodgers in a West Port cellar and carrying them straight to Surgeons' Square through the back door. Meanwhile, a tinsmith's daughter lies in a coffin filled with river gravel, her body already sold before the minister finished his psalm. As the anatomists' hunger for specimens fuels a trade in murder, Murdoch finds himself hunted by watchmen, rival resurrectionists, and the cold-eyed assistants of the most brilliant surgeon in Britain—all while the gold in his pocket burns like a brand.

Atmospheric, historically precise, and utterly gripping, *Body Snatcher of Surgeons' Square* plunges you into the reeking cellars and lamplit lecture halls of Enlightenment Edinburgh, where science and savagery wear the same face. For fans of *The Alienist* and *The Knife Man*, this is Gothic historical crime at its darkest—where the line between doctor and butcher dissolves in the smell of formalin and fresh-turned earth.