Doctor Death
A Madeleine Karno Mystery
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- €5.49
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- €5.49
Publisher Description
The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Boy in the Suitcase draws you into a “gripping” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) mystery from the very first line of this page-turning historical thriller featuring an ambitious young female detective challenging the mores of nineteenth century France.
Strong-minded and ambitious, Madeleine Karno is eager to shatter the constraints of her provincial French upbringing. She longs to become a pathologist like her father, whom she assists, but this is 1894. Autopsies are considered unseemly and ungodly, even when performed by a man.
So it’s no surprise that when seventeen-year-old Cecile Montaine is found dead in the snowy streets of Varbourg, her family will not permit a full postmortem autopsy, and Madeleine and her father are left with a single mysterious clue. Soon after, the priest who held vigil by the dead girl’s corpse is brutally murdered. The thread that connects these two events is a tangled one, and as the death toll mounts, Madeleine must seek knowledge in odd places: behind convent walls, in secret diaries, and in the yellow stare of an aging wolf.
Eloquently written and with powerful insight into human and animal nature, Doctor Death is at once a captivating mystery and a poignant coming-of-age story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set mainly in 1894 in provincial Varbourg, France, Kaaberb l's excellent first in a new historical series introduces Dr. Albert Karno and his scalpel-sharp 20-year-old daughter, Madeleine, who must figure out who murdered lovely 17-year-old Cecile Montaine. Days later, Father Abigore, the Montaine family priest, is murdered as well, and his body is stolen during a violent attack on the hearse transporting it. The investigation pushes passionate aspiring physician Madeleine well beyond conventional expectations for a proper young woman. She goes to Heidelberg to seek the aid of a dashing academic, and later to the forest-ringed Bernardine convent where Cecile was attending school until her disappearance. Deftly exploring such themes as the struggles between mind and body, science and spirit without detracting from a gripping plot the novel transcends its period to contemplate the eternal. Kaaberb l is the coauthor with Agnete Friis of the Nina Borg series (Death of a Nightingale, etc.).
