The Blood

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.

E. S. Thomson has a Ph.D. in the history of medicine and works as a university lecturer in Edinburgh. Her work has been shortlisted for the Saltire First Novel Award and the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award. Beloved Poison was shortlisted for the Scottish Crime Novel of the Year Award, and Dark Asylum was longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Historical Dagger Award. Elaine lives in Edinburgh with her two sons.