About this book:

In the soot-choked heart of Victorian London, American engineer Silas Vance accepts a lucrative commission to electrify Bumble's Fine Taxidermy & Curiosities. But behind the mahogany counter, the specimens aren't merely stuffed—they're wired. Copper mesh threads through preserved muscle, vacuum tubes glow behind glass eyes, and a nightingale in a gilded cage doesn't sing; it arcs blue lightning from its beak. Arthur Bumble doesn't want lighting. He wants animation. He wants to capture the spark of life itself, and he's built a cellar full of predators that hunt by voltage.

As Silas struggles to stabilize Bumble's volatile "galvanic nervous systems," he uncovers a logic more terrifying than madness: the creatures are learning. They recognize frequencies. They react to intent. And the massive bear in the alcove runs on a hybrid chemistry that could level a city block. With a mastermind weaving a clockwork conspiracy across Clerkenwell's fog-shrouded streets, Silas must race against gears, current, and his own disappearing sanity to sever the deadly circuit before the exhibition opens—and the audience becomes the prey.

Steeped in gaslight atmosphere and crackling with Tesla-era dread, *The Taxidermist's Clockwork Specimen* fuses gothic horror with techno-thriller velocity. For readers who crave the brass-and-velvet aesthetic of *The Prestige*, the scientific audacity of *Frankenstein*, and the relentless tension of a locked-room mystery where the room itself is alive, this is Victorian suspense rewired for the electric age.