Dr. Julia Lewis Mystery

November 1866: The grisly murder site in London's East End is thronged with onlookers. None of them expect the calmly efficient young woman among them to be a medical doctor, arrived to examine the corpse. Inspector Richard Tennant, overseeing the investigation, at first makes no effort to disguise his skepticism. But Dr. Julia Lewis is accustomed to such condescension... To study medicine, Julia had to leave Britain, where universities still bar their doors to women, and travel to America. She returned home to work in her grandfather's practice-and to find London in the grip of a devastating cholera epidemic. In four years, however, she has seen nothing quite like this-a local clergyman's body sexually mutilated and displayed in a manner that she-and Tennant-both suspect is personal. Days later, another body is found with links to the first, and Tennant calls in Dr. Lewis again. The murderer begins sending the police taunting letters and tantalizing clues-though the trail leads in multiple directions. Lewis and Tennant struggle to understand the killer's dark obsessions and motivations. But there is new urgency, for the doctor's role appears to have shifted from expert to target. And this killer is no impulsive monster, but a fiendishly calculating opponent, determined to see his plan through to its terrifying conclusion.

London, 1867: Among the genteel young ladies of London society, painting is a perfectly acceptable pastime-but a woman who dares to pursue art as a profession is another prospect, indeed. Dr. Julia Lewis, familiar with the disrespect afforded women in untraditional careers, is hardly surprised when Scotland Yard shows little interest in complaints made by her friend, Mary Allingham, about a break-in at her art studio. Mary is just one of many "lady painters" being targeted by vandals. Painters' sitters are vanishing, too-women viewed by some as dispensable outcasts. Inspector Richard Tennant, however, takes the attacks seriously, suspecting they're linked to the poison-pen letters received by other members of the Allingham family. For Julia, the issue is complicated by Tennant's previous relationship with Mary's sister-in-law, Louisa, and by her own surprising reaction to that entanglement. But when someone close to them commits suicide and a woman turns up dead, the case can no longer be so easily ignored by "respectable" society. Layer after layer, Julia and Tennant scrape away the facts of the case like paint from a canvas. What emerges is a somber picture of vice, depravity, and deception stretching from London's East End to the Far East-with a killer at its center, determined to get away with one last, grisly murder...