The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Boy in the Suitcase draws you into a "gripping" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) mystery from the very first line of this page-turning historical thriller featuring an ambitious young female detective challenging the mores of nineteenth century France.
Strong-minded and ambitious, Madeleine Karno is eager to shatter the constraints of her provincial French upbringing. She longs to become a pathologist like her father, whom she assists, but this is 1894. Autopsies are considered unseemly and ungodly, even when performed by a man.
So it’s no surprise that when seventeen-year-old Cecile Montaine is found dead in the snowy streets of Varbourg, her family will not permit a full postmortem autopsy, and Madeleine and her father are left with a single mysterious clue. Soon after, the priest who held vigil by the dead girl’s corpse is brutally murdered. The thread that connects these two events is a tangled one, and as the death toll mounts, Madeleine must seek knowledge in odd places: behind convent walls, in secret diaries, and in the yellow stare of an aging wolf.
Eloquently written and with powerful insight into human and animal nature, Doctor Death is at once a captivating mystery and a poignant coming-of-age story.