The Taxidermist and the Archivist

About this book:

Beneath the Victorian Society for Natural History, something has been waiting in the dark for seventy years. Silas Thorne, a taxidermist who treats preservation as art, and Julianna Blackwood, an archivist who believes order is the only bulwark against chaos, have spent three years circling each other with scalpels and nib pens. Now, assigned to catalog the forgotten "Legacy Acquisitions" in the deepest vaults, they pry open a crate from a vanished Amazon expedition—and find a specimen that breathes.

It isn't stuffed. It isn't dead. And it isn't alone.

As the subterranean archives stir with impossible movement—mummified skins flexing wireless limbs, jars clouding with fresh fury—Silas and Julianna are forced into a partnership tighter than any mounting stitch. He reads the flesh; she reads the paper trail. Together they must trace the lineage of creatures that defy taxonomy, survive a Director who would rather burn the evidence than fund the truth, and decide whether the things waking in the dark are specimens to be cataloged... or predators to be feared.

*The Taxidermist and the Archivist* is a Victorian gothic fantasy where science and superstition claw at each other in the gaslight, where every preserved pelt hides a secret, and where the most dangerous specimen in the collection might be the partnership holding the scalpel and the pen.