The Taxidermy Shop Mystery

About this book:

In the rain-slicked lanes of 1604 London, fourteen-year-old Gabriel Finch learns the gruesome art of breathing life into the dead. Beneath the sign of the vermilion ermine, his uncle's taxidermy shop preserves more than beasts—it guards the secrets of a city where the river carries contraband as freely as the tide. When a roebuck from a nobleman's hunt yields a scrap of foreign paper stitched into its flesh, marked with the hourglass and oars of a waterman's gate, Gabriel glimpses a message never meant for his eyes. Now the bailiff's sword clatters at the door, his aunt watches with hawk-eyed suspicion, and the master works late into the night with wire, straw, and arsenic, building a lie beautiful enough to hang above a justice's hearth.

Atmospheric and steeped in the reek of brine, camphor, and candle smoke, *The Taxidermy Shop Mystery* stitches historical craft into a taut conspiracy. From the cellar's salt-encrusted flags to the guildhalls where merchants bargain with smugglers, every preserved specimen becomes a vessel, every glass eye a witness. Gabriel must navigate a trade where a slipped stitch ruins a reputation—and a discovered secret costs a life.