In this twisty new Victorian detective thriller from the author of
The Darwin Affair, Inspector Charles Field hunts a serial killer with
a sinister signature targeting Florence Nightingale's nurses in Crimea
and women in London.
Who is stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Is it the legendary
Beast of the Crimean, or someone closer to home? In 1855, Britain and
France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean
Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Nightingale, a wealthy young
society woman, has made it her mission to improve the wretched
conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey--despite fierce
objections from the male doctors around her. When young women start
turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses,
Inspector Charles Field (the real-life inspiration for Charles Dickens's
Inspector Bucket in Bleak House) is sent from England to find the killer
among the doctors, military men, journalists, and others swarming
Turkey's famous Barrack Hospital. Here Field meets both the famous
Nightingale as well as Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman who will become his
wife, and as he races to protect them, the prime suspect takes his own
life.
Case closed. Or is it?
Twelve years later, back in London, amid the turmoil surrounding the
expansion of voting rights, women again start turning up dead, their
mouths covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the
wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat? Either way,
he must race against time to stop the killer before more bodies are
discovered, and before his own family gets pulled into danger. Populated
by real figures of the day, from Benjamin Disraeli to novelist Wilkie
Collins to, of course, Florence Nightingale herself, and steeped in
historical details of 1860s London, The Nightingale Affair plays out
against a backdrop of a rapidly changing society. Most of all, it is a
pure reading delight, offering shocks, unforgettably vivid scenes, and
surprising twists.
