The Wages of Sin
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Sarah Gilchrist has fled London and a troubled past to join the University of Edinburgh's medical school in 1882, the first year it admits women. Determined to become a doctor despite the misgivings of her family and society, Sarah quickly finds plenty of barriers at school itself: professors who refuse to teach their new pupils, male students determined to force out their female counterparts, and female peers who will do anything to avoid being associated with a fallen woman.Desperate for a proper education, Sarah turns to one of the city’s ramshackle charitable hospitals for additional training. The St Giles’ Infirmary for Women ministers to the downtrodden and drunk, the thieves and whores with nowhere else to go. She learns a great deal there, but when one of Sarah’s patients turns up in the university dissecting room as a battered corpse, Sarah finds herself drawn into a murky underworld of bribery, brothels, and body snatchers.Sarah is determined to find out what happened to Lucy and bring those responsible for her death to justice. But as she searches for answers in Edinburgh’s dank alleyways, bawdy houses and fight clubs, Sarah comes closer and closer to uncovering one of Edinburgh’s most lucrative trades, and, in doing so, puts her own life at risk…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Welsh's moving, nuanced first novel, a late Victorian whodunit, Sarah Gilchrist decides to make a new start after an acquaintance sexually assaults her, a traumatic experience that her proper family views as a source of shame. Sarah moves from London to Edinburgh to attend medical school, where she's bullied by her male colleagues and shunned by some of her female ones. In addition to keeping up with her studies, Sarah assists at Saint Giles's Infirmary for Women and Children, a clinic for the indigent. Lucy Collins, a pregnant prostitute, seeks an abortion at Saint Giles's, but the director sends her away. Four nights later, Sarah is shocked to see that the body in the medical school dissection room is Lucy's. Her professor suggests death was caused by a laudanum overdose, but Sarah notices bruises and other marks that suggest Lucy was assaulted, reminding her of her own victimization. Superior characterizations and convincing period detail make up for the routine sleuthing that ensues.
