Winter at the Taxidermist's
A 1920s Family Saga

About this book:

In the frost-locked town of Blackwood, the Kroeger family has spent three generations stitching the dead back into something like life. But behind the sawdust and arsenic of their taxidermy shop lies a darker craft: a ledger of silent commissions, crates that arrive at midnight, and secrets buried beneath the cellar flags. As the winter of 1925 closes in, Silas Kroeger clings to his Victorian monuments, his son Albert drowns in debt and compromise, and grandson James finds himself drawn to the clean geometry of bone—until a golden eagle arrives with a gamekeeper's nervous promise and thirty shillings that smell of hush money.

With the roads snowed under and the coal running out, the shop becomes a pressure cooker of generational rage and quiet dread. Every bird skinned, every hide salted, every entry in the iron-clasped ledger pulls the Kroegers deeper into a web of aristocratic cover-ups and something far older festering in the tannery cellar. The arsenic stains their fingertips; the silence stains their souls. And when the thaw comes, not everything buried in the salt will stay preserved.

Atmospheric, gothic, and taut with suppressed violence, *Winter at the Taxidermist's* is a family saga where preservation is a form of betrayal, and the most dangerous specimens are the ones that look perfectly, terribly alive.