Ghastly Business (ePub)

1929. A girl is strangled ina London alley, the mangled corpse of a peeping Tom is found in a railwaytunnel and the juicy details of the latest trunk murder are updated hourly infresh editions of the evening papers.

Into this insalubrious world steps Dora Strang, a doctor's daughter with anunmaidenly passion for anatomy. Denied her own medical career, she moves intolodgings with a hilarious, insecticidal landlady and begins life as filingclerk to the country's pre-eminent pathologist, Alfred Kemble.

Dora is thrilled by the grisly post-mortems and the headline-grabbing courtcases and more fascinated still by the pathologist himself: an enigmatic warhero with bottle-green eyes and an air of sardonic glamour - the embodiment ofall her girlish fantasies. But Dora's job holds more than a few surprises, notleast of which is finding herself frequently under the watchful gaze - andoccasionally wandering hands - of the distinguished Dr Kemble. As things take adistinctly ghastly turn, both in one of the department's major cases and inDora's own life, the newspaper reporters sharpen their pencils in morbidanticipation … But can the impressionable Miss Strang emerge unscathed?

Ghastly Business conjures the world ofinterwar London with gleeful vigour: a time when a woman's body was onlymentioned if someone had dismembered it; when the scars of the Great War werestill fresh and when a pretty young bluestocking needed to tread very carefullyin order to avoid becoming yet another of its casualties.