The Blood
A Jem Flockhart Mystery
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In a hunt that takes Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain through the harrowing streets of Victorian London to the dangers of the seamen's floating hospital, The Blood, they will endeavor to solve a dark and terrible new mystery.
Summoned to the riverside by the desperate, scribbled note of an old friend, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain find themselves onboard the seamen's floating hospital, an old hulk known only as The Blood, where prejudice, ambition, and murder seethe beneath a veneer of medical respectability.
On shore, a young woman, a known prostitute, is found drowned in a derelict boatyard. A man leaps to his death into the Thames, driven mad by poison and fear. The events are linked—but how? Courting danger in the opium dens and brothels of the waterfront, certain that The Blood lies at the heart of the puzzle, Jem and Will embark on a quest to uncover the truth. In a hunt that takes them from the dissecting tables of a private anatomy school to the squalor of the dock-side mortuary, they find themselves involved in a dark and terrible mystery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
London apothecary Jem Flockhart tackles two cases in Thomson's standout third Victorian mystery (after 2017's Dark Asylum). Jem receives a message from her friend John Aberlady, who works at the Seaman's Floating Hospital, a decommissioned naval frigate colloquially known as the Blood and Fleas, imploring her to come quickly. The ominous final sentence reads: "Come now, Jem, but come ready to face the Devil." When Jem boards the Blood, which is anchored in the Thames, she learns that Aberlady has been missing for a week. In the course of her search for him, Jem finds the body of prostitute Mary Mercer in the water near the Blood. Soon she is also seeking Mary's killer. The discovery validates Jem's father's grim dictum that "the corpses of men find their way into the river by accident. Women's arrive there by design." While the puzzle element of the plot is first-rate, what really distinguishes Thomson's work is her depiction of London's poor, whose precarious river-based livelihoods depend "on the direction of the wind." Readers will eagerly await Jem's next outing.)
