A Corruption of Blood

Edinburgh, 1850. Will Raven is drawn into a murder case after human remains wash ashore at Leith and a man he has every reason to dislike asks for help escaping the gallows. Sarah Fisher, meanwhile, is pursuing a different kind of investigation involving infants, desperate mothers and the shadowy arrangements by which unwanted children can disappear. Their separate inquiries pull them between the city’s wealthy households and its most precarious lives, revealing how inheritance, reputation and poverty can determine whose suffering is noticed and whose is ignored.

Sarah’s determination to become a doctor gives the novel an important historical strand beyond the crime plot. She seeks out Elizabeth Blackwell, who had become the first woman in the modern era to receive a medical degree in the United States in 1849, while James Young Simpson’s household remains the centre of her practical medical education. Parry uses these real figures to set Sarah’s ambitions against the institutional barriers facing women, while the investigation into infant death and exploitation exposes the severe social consequences of illegitimacy, poverty and restricted female autonomy in mid-Victorian Britain.