Rush of Blood
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Ten-year-old Hilda's search for her missing friend has terrible consequences in this gripping psychological thriller.
When her friend Meda fails to turn up for dance class one evening, 10-year-old Hilda is convinced that something bad has happened to her, despite Meda's family's reassurances. Unable to shake off her concerns, Hilda turns to her mother, Molly, for help. Molly runs the Jolly Bonnet, a pub with links to the Whitechapel murders of a century before and a meeting place for an assortment of eccentrics drawn to its warm embrace. Among them is Lottie. Pathologist by day, vlogger by night, Lottie enlists the help of her army of online fans - and uncovers evidence that Meda isn't the first young girl to go missing.
But Molly and Lottie's investigations attract unwelcome attention. Two worlds are about to collide in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on the rain-lashed streets of London's East End, a historic neighbourhood that has run red with the blood of innocents for centuries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in London ("with its rain and its noise and the feeling that every breath has been through a million other lungs before it reaches your own"), this vivid and often witty gothic thriller from Mark (The Mausoleum) comes complete with all the trimmings: madness, death, a gloomy house that holds a terrifying secret, and echoes of a bloody past. Ten-year-old Hilda is the daughter of Molly, the manager of the Jolly Bonnet, "Whitechapel's premier Victorian gin bar." Decorated with antique medical equipment, the pub is "a must-see destination for anybody with an interest in the murky world of morbid anatomy." When a schoolmate goes missing, Hilda seeks help in finding her from Molly and Lottie, "a well-respected pathologist and an excellent curator of the necro-museum she personally established," who has her own YouTube channel. Lottie and her posse of followers soon discover that other young girls have gone missing. The blood-drenched finale and disturbingly creepy epilogue will long remain in the mind of the reader. Those with a taste for the macabre will be well satisfied.
