Book
The Spendthrift and the Swallow
First published 2023
Edinburgh, January 1853. Cora Carlton, the fashionable wife of an extravagant entrepreneur, dies suddenly after the New Year celebrations. Because James Young Simpson had been treating her, rumour quickly turns a private death into a threat to the physician’s reputation. Will Raven and Sarah Fisher are asked to establish what actually happened, carrying their inquiry from respectable society into less respectable parts of the city as they test gossip against medical evidence.
This companion short story sits between A Corruption of Blood and Voices of the Dead and concentrates the series’ recurring concerns into a smaller case: reputation, class, medical uncertainty and the ease with which scandal can overwhelm fact. Simpson’s public standing matters because by 1853 chloroform had made him one of Britain’s most famous doctors. Raven and Fisher must therefore solve more than a suspicious death; they must decide whether the evidence can withstand a city eager to believe the worst.
