1. A Rustle of Silk
Devon, 1603. Former ship’s surgeon Gabriel Taverner has left the sea after an injury and is trying to establish himself as a country physician. When Coroner Theophilus Davey asks him to examine a decomposed body found beside a river, Gabriel discovers a personal connection to the…
2. The Angel in the Glass
June 1604. Gabriel Taverner is called to examine an emaciated vagrant whose condition seems at first to belong to the ordinary hardships of rural Devon. A disturbing discovery connected with the man, however, opens a trail into events buried for fourteen years and raises questions that…
3. The Indigo Ghosts
October 1604. Gabriel Taverner is summoned to Plymouth by his former naval captain, Ezekiel Colt, whose ship has returned from the Caribbean with a terrified crew claiming to have seen blue-skinned ghosts aboard. Gabriel rejects the supernatural explanation, but the discovery of a concealed body inside…
4. Magic in the Weave
October 1604. Plague in London has closed the theatres and sent a travelling company west on a ‘plague tour’, bringing actors, secrets and danger to Plymouth. Their performances trade on stories of magic and witchcraft, but Gabriel Taverner soon finds that the deaths surrounding the company…
5. The Cargo from Neira
February 1605. A sequence of killings unsettles Devon’s Tavy valley, and country physician Gabriel Taverner is asked by the coroner to examine the bodies. He suspects that the murders are connected to a mysterious woman found in desperate circumstances, but the link becomes stranger when nutmegs…
6. The Chrysanthemum Tiger
March 1605. Having discovered that the injury which once ended his life at sea no longer causes disabling sickness, Gabriel Taverner accepts work from the wealthy merchant Walter Haverleigh. He joins the Luipaard as ship’s doctor for a voyage to the Eastern seas, leaving his Devon…