The Dead Horse Veterinarian
A Ghost Story of the 1840s Fens

About this book:

The Cambridgeshire Fens, 1843: where the black soil swallows boots whole, the mist hides older things than drainage ditches, and four prize mares have dropped dead in a locked paddock—eyes turned white as quartz, hearts stopped cold without a mark upon them. Gideon Vale, a disgraced veterinary surgeon drowning in debt and fen-mud, wants only to drink his laudanum and be left alone. Lady Clara Vance, the earl's daughter who bought his practice to save her family's land from a steam-powered syndicate, has other plans. She needs a man of science who doesn't believe in ghosts. He needs the money to survive the winter. Neither expects the truth buried beneath the peat.

When the local farmers whisper of marsh-spirits wakened by the new drainage works, Gideon finds himself cutting open carcasses by candlelight, chasing a killer who leaves tracks that ripple like ancient bone and a cold that no November frost can explain. From the slave-wrought wealth of the Vance estates to the eel-poachers' huts on Whittlesey Mere, the investigation pulls them deeper into a conspiracy of greed, enclosure, and something far older than the drainage boards—something that remembers every hand that ever drove a spade into the black earth.

Atmospheric, razor-sharp, and steeped in the grit of 1840s veterinary science, *The Dead Horse Veterinarian* is a gothic mystery where the line between pathology and haunting dissolves in the rising water. For fans of *The Essex Serpent* and *The Silence of the Bones*, this is historical horror that bites deep: a story of class, science, and the terrible price of draining the dark.